Baking with Whole Grains

Whole grains are becoming more and more widely used in home baking, and since I love whole grains and most of my (failed) baking attempts have involved whole what flour, I was excited that our King Arthur Flour experience included a class on baking with whole grains. Before I get down to the baking part of the post, and since it is Whole Grains Month, I am pleased to announce that the winner of The Oldways Table is Megan from the blog Stetted! Megan please email me with your contact info so I can send your prize.

Our second baking adventure at King Arthur was making multi-seed crackerbread. You can get the recipe here, and it is beyond easy. I am looking forward to homemade crackers and cheese!

Just as with the pizza dough, we watched Susan do a demo of making the cracker dough, then set out in pairs to make our own.

The recipe for multi-seed crackerbread is incredibly simple and versatile as it allows each baker to add her own seeds and herbs for completely personalized crackers
Alicia and Megan were partners for the day. Here they are hard at work making cracker dough. Michelle flours the work table while Bridget makes the dough.	Daisy and I were partners for the crackerbread. We made a good team! And here we have Katie and Jen. How happy does everyone look?!   Elina and Kerstin scraping their cracker dough out of the bowl

Once we had made our cracker dough, we went back up to the demo space so Susan could show us how to roll it out and add the toppings. We had so many fun options available to us, including fresh herbs from the King Arthur garden.

It is so funny to be with a group of bloggers. Someone is always taking a photo!

I loved making the crackers because, in addition to being so simple, they allow you to get creative with the variety of seeds, herbs, and flavorings. I want to make curry crackers and cinnamon crackers, and I think I actually have all of the ingredients at home!

After we watched the demo on how to finish our crackers, we chose our toppings and returned to our work spaces to cut and roll out the dough.

In a few short minutes, we had ready-to-bake crackers! And we got to see the big King Arthur oven. It is very deep and has multiple levels. The doors are small and open inward so that the heat of the oven is preserved. A long stretcher-like conveyor belt is used to quickly push in pans. It was so neat to see how they can bake so many things at once.

Once our crackers were in the oven, we had a little snack (fresh made bread and butter, yum!) and then moved on to our next whole grain baking task. . . brownies! You will want to see these photos and to use this recipe, just trust me on this one, and I will be posting it tomorrow.

I am playing around with photo layouts for big events like our day at King Arthur. I have lots of work to do on them still, but do you prefer big single photos to the table with photos and captions? Does a mix of both look weird? I am hoping to make some blog improvements over the next couple of months, and feedback is welcome!