Do wheat berries get too old for bread baking?
Hi,
I have searched a lot to see if this is answered already, sorry if I missed any existing answers.
The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book is my fave whole grain cookbook. I've been using her basic loaf recipe for years to make nice fluffy sandwich loaves. I mill my own flour from hard red and white winter wheat. It's just a plain 2-loaf recipe: flour, yeast, salt, water, honey, oil, and a tablespoon of gluten flour. I have a Bosch Universal mixer for kneading, lowest speed.
I've not had any trouble with this recipe until recently, my loaves barely rise. Usually I get nice big fat domed loaves. I have tried:
- fresh yeast
- carefully controlling temperatures
- shorter and longer kneading times
- more care in dough handling
The last thing I can think of to try is to buy new fresh wheat berries. The wheat berries I have are 3 years old. They've been stored in a plastic food-safe bucket in a cool closet. The bread tastes good, and the wheat berries and flour smell fine, no signs of rancidity. Do wheat berries go stale and then not rise? I already ordered some fresh, curious what anyone can tell me. Thanks!
Since you've properly stored your berries, I think they should be okay. You might want to check the calibration on your grain mill. At one time my mill started to grind the berries more coarsely than I wanted (all that shaking?). I've made the basic recipe from Laurel's book many times and it usually rises fine.
I would look at starter - if everything else hasn't changed - that can and will change. Enjoy!
Have you tried a new entirely different batch of yeast? what kind do you use?
Yes, they change with long storage. The flour milling tests show, for example, that after storing wheat kernels for 30 months at 21C they increased their W (flour strength, falling number) nearly 50%.
Their conclusions were
Your flour became too strong due to long term storage, over 30months.
Excellent information to know. I never really end up with extra grains for that long but now I know to use them or lose them.
Well I'll be hornswoggled. Thanks for finding this information. I usually use up my grains in a year, this batch got lost in the back of the closet. My new hard white wheat from Azure Standard will be here in a couple days, looking forward to floofy loaves again!
might it also depend on how the grains are stored? Presence of oxygen, humidity, ect.?
I can't speak to the science posted by Mariana and have no need or reason to dispute it. I can only offer my experience. A few years ago one of my customers offered me a 5 gallon bucket of wheat berries that had been sealed and saved in case of catastrophic events rolling over from years 1999 to 2000. (Nothing of note happened of course!). I used them in my micro bakery and have no recollection that were problems with the bread. I'm generally baking at 50% or less whole grain for customers and this was more or less about when I was starting out, probably around 2015, and less experienced so might not have noticed!
I too was given "prepper" grain.(btw I don't agree with hoarding grain in this way, and even more so now.) It was Hard White Wheat from 2011 harvest, opened in 2022. I got some Oct 2023 and milled it myself then tried everything to make a starter from it. It is dead. I think it might have been irradiated. It will not create or sustain a starter. Sure, it would probably work in a raised bread, especially if it is mixed with other flours. It does have a gluten structure and makes puffy unleavened flat bread which tastes fine, but the starches must be altered or sterile. I'm so freaked about not being able to start from it, that now I don't even want to use it for food. I wonder if it would even sprout?
there really isn't such a thing as sterile starches, they are chemicals to begin with. Starches feed yeast, there is nothing that irradiation can do to prevent that.
I agree, so perhaps it is that the yeasts/bacteria are not present in large numbers rather than they cannot thrive on this flour. Either way, it is not behaving like other whole grain flours for making a starter, and since I believe starters should be made from each harvest of grain that is used for the bread, I will not be using this grain.