Kasha Encounter

I found some kasha (buckwheat) flour at the Natural Pantry store last week to experiment with it.  It's kind of an ugly unappealing color and has a funny smell to it, but it's supposed to be really good for you.   It boasts of having all of the amino acids that a human being needs, especially lysine.  Plus it's high in copper and magnesium and your B vitamins.  AND it's high in protein, easy to digest, and gluten free.  (not that gluten is an issue for me).  But in this recipe, only 1/2 cup was distributed into the whole thing, so that's probably not enough to be of much significance, but just to make myself feel better, I figure anything healthy that's added to the evil white flour has to make the evil white flour not as evil.  Just my theory.

It looks and feels exactly like volcano ashes.  It even has the little black specks in it.  When you rub it between your fingers, it feels like soft talcum powder.  If it tastes anything like it smells, do I really wanna eat it?

In one of my recipe books, I found a recipe for Kasha Bread.  The recipe calls for kasha groats that I was supposed to cook, but I modified the recipe for kasha flour instead, since that is what I was working with.  I looked at some pictures of kasha bread on the internet to get an idea of what kasha bread is supposed to look like, but they all looked unappetizing to me because they looked dense.  I guess I learned to expect healthy looking brown breads to be heavy and dense.  I like my bread light and fluffy so, feeling turned off of this experiment, I was going to give up it, while I imagined myself chucking a hard brick of bread into the garbage and saying "well, THAT was a waste of my time!!".

But then curiosity got the best of me so I went ahead with the experiment.  The recipe called for 7 cups of flour total, which I knew was going to make a lot of bread, so I cut the recipe in half, using 2 cups "evil" white flour, 1 cup whole wheat flour, and 1/2 cup kasha flour.  Usually I don't use a 2:1 ratio of white/wheat flour cuz the bread ends up heavy.  I usually prefer to use a 3:1 or a 4:1 ratio.  Plus, not knowing what the kasha flour was gonna do it, my hopes for this bread weren't very high.

Maybe it's because I had to modify the flour into the recipe (instead of using whole groats), but I ended up using extra white flour because the dough was too moist.  But after I got it all kneaded together, I became more hopeful for the outcome of this bread.

The drought turned out nice and soft, and didn't feel heavy at all, and it had no problem rising.  See my finger indentation?  It's ready to shape into loaves now.

Instead of the tradition 9x5 (meatloaf) pans, I prefer to make my bread in the 8x4 pans.  Every time I make bread in the 9x5 pans, the slices won't fit in the toaster very well.  Besides, I like my bread slices a little smaller anyway.  So I divided the dough into two 8x4 pans.  And they rose very nicely.

And here is the finished product:

Don't let the brown color lead you into thinking it's one of those dense heavy breads.  This bread actually turned out nice and squishy, and it tastes good too!  This recipe is a keeper!  NOM-NOM!

And it passed the hubster test!!!

Here is a picture of Kiska who doesn't care at all for Kasha Bread.