Bread & Crackers

After musing over the beauty of Danish, wholegrain rye bread and stating that these days, I would much rather be baking and enjoying some raw bread and crackers with the help of all the grrreat recipes out there, I think I ought to mention a couple of those recipes I am making most often right now.

Bread-wise, today is a special day for me: I successfully made up my own recipe and dried myself a beautiful, unbaked bread in the oven. I admit I had some heavy inspiration: reading this post had me wanting to make Ani Phyo's Amazing Raw Toast, and I just couldn't wait until the day when I inevitably purchase her book, so I had to re-construct something on the basis of the hints for the recipe. I will write what I did at the end of this post, and since I'm already feeling guilty I'll say that in all fairness, I am going to purchase Ani Phyo's latest book first chance I get.

I have two current faves: one is an Ani Phyo Raw Pine Nut Sunflower Bread that I found on This Vegan Life. I looked for the recipe on Ani's homepage too - can't find it, but the site had a webpage-makeover not long ago, so I hope it was public before. I'm gonna have to buy TWO Ani Phyo books after this... My other fave is Pumpkin Seed Crackers from Rawmazing - and this is raw-mazing, and do soak the pumpkin seeds: if you like them before soaking you are going to love them after.

And a future favorite perhaps: today I found this post at The Raw Project, and the recipe for Lucky Hemp Bread was an instant addition to my list of things to try in the near future - after making a cupcake in support (yeah, it's quite the sacrifice I know, guess I'll have to eat it, too) of Shannon Marie's quest to have Ellen Degeneres feast on a raw cupcake. Got the book, am meaning to (un)bake. In Christine's Hemp Bread post there's a cute/gross - depending on how you see it, I guess - detail about finding a worm in an organic walnut which made me laugh, so I just have to share my organic produce-story: I too once found a larvae nesting in a little web in my bag of organic dates but another little incident took the cake - and though I'm not at all grossed out by bugs (if you eat organic veg you probably ate your share, after all) but I'm glad it happened to me and not someone I invited for dinner :-O. After eating a nice big salad we sat and talked for a while at the table and I realised that (what I thought was) the little shred of salad still stuck on my plate was moving... I looked closer, and it was a rainworm-looking creature as big as the teeth on my fork, turning and twisting - wondering where all the food went, I suppose. Hmm, hope that one didn't have too many brothers and sisters in there...

Here's what I mixed together for my re-constructed, Ani Phyo-esque, toast-ish recipe which turned out both readily spreadable, perfectly texturized, a bit heavy on the buckwheat but with a nice hint of sweetness. I don't really consider it an entirely new recipe, but it still feels like I have somehow graduated a course in "raw cracker-making":

1 cup almond pulp (on this occasion my almond pulp had little bits of rooibosh tea in it)

1 cup sprouted buckwheat groats

1/2 cup ground, golden flax seeds

1/2 cup sesame seeds

1/2 cup goji berries and dried, diced apricots

1 tbsp black sesame seeds

1 tbsp poppy seeds

Groats and almond pulp got a coupl'a whirls in the food processor before I added the rest - except about half the gojis and apricots, which I added last to keep them whole. While processing, I started out by adding a couple of tbsps coconut butter with a half a cup of water but ended up adding a lot more - my food processor needs a little help. I spread it like the other crackers and breads and dehydrated and voila!