What is Sprouted Bread?
Article How is Sprouted Bread Made?
How Sprouted Bread is Made in 4 Simple Steps
Whether you’re making it at home, or at the scale we make it with the help of dozens of bakers per day at our bakery in Abbotsford, British Columbia, sprouted whole grain bread is made with the same four simple steps:
Clean + Rinse
It can be a long journey from the grain harvest to your kitchen or our bakery, so whole grains need extra care before they’re ready to sprout.
Whole grains like wheat can have bits of chaff, dirt or other small bits from the field, whether you buy them by the bag from your local store’s shelf, or by the truck load like we do for the bakery.
That means cleaning, sifting, and sorting the grains before rinsing them again to make sure they’re as clean as can be.
Soak + Drain
Every type of grain has its own sprouting schedule, but they all start with a soak in clear, fresh water at just the right temperature and for just as many hours as they need to sprout.
The soaking and sprouting process can take more or less time, depending on anything from how dry the grain is when you start soaking it, to how warm or humid your kitchen (or our bakery) is.
But even though there’s no set-in-stone schedule, you don’t have to guess—the grain will tell you when it’s ready. When you can see the sprout’s tail emerging from the kernel, that lets you know the grain’s enzymes are fully active, and it’s time to make the dough.
Mash Dough + Add Ingredients
Once the sprouted whole grains are ready, the work of making the bread can finally begin.
Rather than measuring out flour and adding water, the next step in making sprouted bread is to make a mash from the sprouted whole grains.
Then mashed grains are mixed with yeast (plus little something sweet like raisin or apple puree to wake it up), salt, and a selection of other ingredients—like seeds, seasonings, or other grains—that make one sprouted bread recipe unique from another.
Just like regular yeast-raised breads, sprouted whole grain bread dough needs time to rise before being shaped, rolled in delicious toppings, then rested to rise again before it’s ready to bake.
Bake, Slice + Enjoy
Loaf pans of dough made with sprouted whole grains and a simple list of ingredients are loaded into the oven and baked, just like conventional bread.
The hardest part of the baking? Waiting long enough for the bread to cool before you slice it in a kitchen or bakery filled with the sweet aroma of freshly baked bread!
Making Sprouted Bread at Home
The process of making sprouted bread was perfected over centuries in home kitchens, using only the simplest tools, patience, and a pair of hands.
Silver Hills Sprouted Bakery began with a humble loaf of sprouted whole grain bread, made by hand with care from a family recipe, passed down from mother to son, and shared with a community.
And that means you definitely don’t need a kitchen full of special equipment or fancy kitchen tools to make sprouted whole grain bread at home. All you need are:
While there is some art in perfecting the process and recipe for sprouted whole grain bread, it is absolutely possible to make light, tender loaves entirely from sprouted grains, right in your own home.
What About Sprouted Flours?
If you keep all the parts of the grain when you process it, 100% whole grain flour still counts as whole grain, nutritionally-speaking. And the same is true for flour made from sprouted whole grains.
While bread made from sprouted whole grain flour doesn’t have the same rich, textural qualities as bread made from mashed sprouted whole grains, using flour made from sprouted whole grains is an easy way to incorporate the benefits of sprouted grains into your own baking.
Sprouted whole grain flours give you the goodness of sprouted whole grains without the time commitment of sprouting whole grains yourself.
How to Use Sprouted Flour in Your Favourite Recipes
Swap sprouted whole grain flour anywhere you’d use conventional whole wheat flour in your favourite bread, muffin, pancake, waffle, or cookie recipes!
Making Sprouted Bread at Scale
Every ingredient you’ll find in Silver Hills Sprouted Bakery breads is something you could use or make in your own kitchen at home. The only real difference between making sprouted bread at home and making it in a bakery is the size of the mixing bowl!
We’ve had over 30 years to develop and perfect specialized and proprietary processes that make our sprouted breads beloved by families like yours. And we think every minute that goes into each loaf is worth it.
But even though we use very large containers instead of bowls for soaking and sprouting, our mixers are big enough to stand in, and we have more ovens (and more cooling racks!), one thing stays the same—whole grains sprout on their own schedule.
Baking sprouted whole grain bread at scale comes with many unique challenges that bakeries making conventional bread don’t have. From start to finish, a loaf of sprouted whole grain bread takes more than two days to make, with over 24 hours dedicated to soaking and sprouting alone.
Where the home baker uses mixing bowls for soaking and sprouting whole grains, a 3 to 5 cup food processor or meat grinder for mashing them, and their hands or a countertop stand mixer for mixing and kneading the dough, everything in an industrial scale bakery is just…bigger.
Up Next in What is Sprouted Bread?
If you’ve read all four parts of our What is Sprouted Bread collection, congratulations! You know the difference between refined grains and whole grains, what sprouted grains are, how sprouted bread is different from flour-based bread, and how sprouted bread is made.
Now explore the benefits of sprouting in our Why is Sprouted Bread Better collection!
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Silver Hills Bakery’s Sprouted Education Series:
What?
Part 1: The WHAT of Sprouted Whole Grains
Why?
Part 2: The WHY of Sprouted Whole Grains
Try!
Part 3: Now TRY Sprouted Whole Grains