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What makes a good sourdough bread? A crispy crust and a medium-firm crumb! We will explain how you can bake your own wholemeal bread with sourdough and what you need to pay particular attention to. So nothing stands in the way of your next breakfast or dinner with your “own” bread.

After we presented you with a real lightning-fast bread recipe last week, we now come to the slow-food variant: baking a wholemeal bread with homemade sourdough that takes several days to prepare. Rest assured: this effort is worth it! Enjoying the first slice of home-baked sourdough bread just makes you proud – apart from the fact that the home-baked bread tastes really good too! Incidentally, you do not have to go through the effort of preparing a sourdough for every bread. Because once it has been prepared, you can use the sourdough starter later to bake other bread.

Bake wholemeal bread yourself: the preparation

Ingredients for the sourdough:

  • 250 ml warm water
  • 1 tsp honey
  • 150 g wholemeal rye flour

Preparation:

  1. In a large bowl, stir the water with the honey until the honey has dissolved. Add the flour and mix with a wooden spoon to form a smooth batter.
  2. Cover the bowl with a suitable lid and leave it in a warm place (at least 20 °C) for 3 days, stirring vigorously once a day – in the morning and in the evening.
  3. The dough starts to form bubbles as a result of fermentation and increases in volume in the bowl. The vigorous stirring makes it collapse again and again. The finished dough is viscous, smells fresh and sour, and has bubbles.

Bake wholemeal bread yourself: prepare the wholemeal bread dough

Ingredients:

  • 250 ml warm water
  • 500 grams of sourdough
  • 500 g wholemeal rye flour
  • 1 tbsp sea salt
  • 1 tsp bread spice (a mixture of aniseed, fennel, coriander, and cumin) to taste
  • For sprinkling kernels or seeds to taste

Preparation:

  1. Place all ingredients in a large bowl and knead.
  2. Pour the batter into a loaf pan lined with baking paper and cover with a kitchen towel. Leave for another 12 hours.
  3. The next morning the dough should have risen a bit. Preheat the oven to 270°C (top and bottom heat) and place a small saucepan filled with water on the oven floor.
  4. Wet the surface of the bread with a little water and sprinkle with sunflower seeds or pumpkin seeds if you like. Then put the bread in the loaf pan in the oven. After 5 minutes reduce the temperature to 200 °C and let the bread bake for another 40 minutes.
  5. After 40 minutes the bread is ready. If you prefer a slightly darker crust, turn out of the loaf tin and bake for a further 5 minutes at 200°C.

With its valuable nutritional values, wholemeal spelled flour is considered to be particularly healthy. Here you can find out how many calories, fibre, protein and minerals are in spelled and how you can use the flour.

Wheat flour is the most commonly used flour in the world, but in recent years the ancient grain spelled has experienced a well-deserved renaissance. Wholemeal spelled flour is not only popular with wheat intolerance, but also with a healthy balanced diet.

Wholemeal Spelled Flour: Calories and Nutritional Values

Due to its high nutrient content, wholemeal spelled flour is often traded as a healthier alternative to wheat flour. The flour made from the whole spelled grain not only scores with complex carbohydrates, a high protein content and lots of fiber – the spelled flour also contains numerous minerals and vitamins.

The calories and nutritional values ​​of wholemeal spelled flour are subject to fluctuations and differ slightly from flour to flour. Among other things, we looked at the nutritional values ​​of dm’s organic wholemeal spelled flour – information per 100 grams:
Calories: 353 kcal – Wholemeal spelled flour has a relatively high nutrient density. The high calorie content is due, among other things, to the large proportion of protein and fiber – these are therefore “healthy” calories.
Carbohydrates: 64 g (of which sugar 1.7 g) – Like all wholemeal flours, wholemeal spelled flour is also rich in long-chain carbohydrates, which provide the body with energy over the long term and are considered the “healthy” carbohydrates.
Protein: 14 g – With around 14 percent protein, wholemeal spelled flour supports muscle building. Since spelled contains all eight essential amino acids, it is an excellent source of vegetable protein.
Fat: 2.6 g – There is relatively little fat in spelled, which is why it is also suitable for a low-fat diet – which incidentally applies to many types of grain.
Fiber: 8.4 g – With more than eight percent fiber, wholemeal spelled flour is one of the foods rich in fiber. Spelled thus supports healthy digestion and keeps you full for a long time.

Wholemeal spelled flour – rich in minerals and vitamins

However, wholemeal spelled flour is not only convincing with its valuable macronutrients: The micronutrients it contains also show that spelled is rightly considered healthy. Spelled flour contains the following vitamins:
B vitamins: The main ingredients in wholemeal spelled flour are vitamin B2 (riboflavin), vitamin B3 (niacin) and vitamin B6. Spelled flour thus contributes to a healthy metabolism and immune system.
Vitamin A: With a relatively high content of beta-carotene (the precursor of vitamin A), spelled can also contribute to healthy skin and eyes.
Vitamin E: Wholemeal spelled flour contains vitamin E, also known as tocopherol. Among other things, this vitamin helps to protect the body cells from free radicals.
Wholemeal spelled flour also contains the following minerals and trace elements:
iron
potassium
copper
magnesium
sodium
phosphorus
zinc
According to a 2008 scientific paper, spelled flour contains about 30 to 60 percent more iron, zinc, copper, magnesium and phosphorus than wheat flour.

By the way: It matters whether you use white flour or wholemeal flour, especially with regard to the vitamin and mineral content. Because: Most of the micronutrients are in the outer layers of the grain, which are also processed in the wholemeal flour. See the next section for more tips on flour types.

Because toast is considered unhealthy, more and more people are now turning to normal bread. Could whole grain toast be a healthier alternative to buttered toast? How does it compare to real whole wheat bread?

Fresh from the toaster for breakfast or as a juicy sandwich in between – toast bread is popular and versatile. However, toast has been criticized for some time: Compared to normal bread, it is unhealthy. Wholemeal toast, on the other hand, enjoys a better image, after all it contains the whole grain. We explain how butter toast, wholemeal toast and normal (wholemeal) bread compare.

This is what toast is made of

Every conventional bread contains flour, water, yeast and usually also salt. This applies to mixed rye bread from the bakery as well as to rolls from the discounter – and also to packaged toast.

Unlike conventional bread, toast bread also contains a whole range of other ingredients: in addition to fat and sugar, it often also contains milk, soy and numerous additives such as acidity regulators, acidifiers, emulsifiers, stabilizers, preservatives and enzymes.

In a nutshell:

Toast contains more additives, making it a more processed product than regular bread.
Toast bread provides significantly less fiber and is therefore less full.
At the same time, it contains significantly more sugar and fat than conventional bread.

Is Wholemeal Toast a Healthier Alternative?

The industry has now responded to consumer demand: in addition to classic butter toast, most supermarkets and brands also offer wholemeal toast products. These are considered healthier because they contain whole grains.

The Bavarian Consumer Advice Center states in a comparison of butter and wholemeal toast:

Wholemeal toast contains significantly more fiber than regular toast. As a result, it has a better satiety value than buttered toast.
Therefore, fewer slices of whole grain toast fill you up, which means you need fewer spreads that are high in sugar and fat.
A breakfast with whole grain toast therefore tends to be healthier as it is lower in sugar and fat than one with conventional buttered toast.

Wholemeal rice contains a particularly large number of vitamins, dietary fibers and trace elements. In this article you will find out exactly what nutritional values ​​are in whole grain rice and what you should consider when preparing it.

Parboiled rice, white rice, basmati rice, wild rice: there are many different types and varieties of rice, some of which differ greatly from one another. In this article, we take a closer look at whole grain rice, also known as brown rice or brown rice. Utopia tells you what you should know about nutritional values ​​and cultivation and what you need to look out for when shopping and preparing.

Brown Rice: These nutritional values ​​make it so healthy

The nutritional value of rice largely depends on how far the rice grain has been processed. For white rice, for example, the silver skin and the germ are removed. However, these parts of the grain of rice contain a particularly large number of nutrients. Wholemeal rice, on the other hand, is largely untreated: it only lacks the inedible husk. That is why brown rice is also considered to be the healthiest rice.

Since rice is a natural product and the exact nutrient content depends on the rice variety and the growing conditions, the nutritional values ​​of whole grain rice also differ depending on the product.

In terms of calories, carbohydrates and protein, whole grain rice hardly differs from white rice. However, whole grain rice contains significantly more minerals such as potassium, magnesium and iron as well as more vitamin B1 and vitamin B3.

The carbohydrates are primarily long-chain carbohydrates, which are considered to be the healthier carbohydrates. With almost eight percent protein, brown rice is also a good source of vegetable protein.

However, there is one major shortcoming with whole grain rice: the arsenic content. The harmful semi-metal is mainly found in the husk of the rice grain, which is why whole grain rice contains significantly more arsenic than white rice. To reduce the arsenic content, you should therefore rinse and soak rice well. Reading tip: In our special article we explain everything you need to know about rice and arsenic.

Prepare whole grain rice: tips for the kitchen

As mentioned in the first section, you should wash whole grain rice thoroughly before preparing it and ideally soak it for several hours. This allows you to significantly reduce the arsenic content. You can find out the background and what you should pay attention to in our article Washing or soaking rice – does that make sense? If you want it to be extra quick, you can skip the soaking. In any case, you should wash the brown rice until the water runs clear.

You can then cook the whole grain rice in two different ways:

Add five times as much water as rice to the saucepan. With this cooking method, the arsenic content in the rice is further reduced. Due to the high water and energy consumption, this is also less environmentally friendly.
With the quick swelling method, you only add twice the amount of water to the pot.
In any case, you put the whole grain rice in the cold water, then bring it to a boil and simmer the covered rice for about twenty minutes over a low heat. Then let the brown rice soak in the saucepan for another ten minutes.