A great way to clean out the kitchen, complement a meal, or treat yourself to a delicious craving-killer, this recipe for Ezekiel bread will provide you the foundation for a healthy and legacy-filled loaf.
But more than that, it also enables you to personalize your results, ensuring that your baking experience is one of a kind.
Contents
What is Ezekiel Bread?
If you’re already familiar with it, you will know that Ezekiel bread is an essential inclusion for the healthy kitchen, and that it challenges the modern understanding of what ingredients make a proper loaf of bread.
If the recipe is unfamiliar, then prepare to step outside of your carbohydrate comfort zone and explore an unusual loaf that you can make in your own home.
This recipe will introduce you to the basics of the bread, as well as potential alternatives that will allow you to spice up, sweeten, and personalize your loaf.
Ezekiel bread ingredients are a collection of familiar foods that you wouldn’t assume, when mixed, would make a delicious loaf, but in fact, their combined texture and flavor provide a sturdy, crumbly loaf that will satisfy anyone who eats it.
If you are looking to improve your health, but removing bread from your diet is unthinkable, then Ezekiel bread is an excellent alternative. You can find loaves of this bread at your local Whole Foods, if you like, but you can also make it in your own kitchen.
The recipe for this tasty treat has a long history, harkening back to its namesake, the book of Ezekiel in the Christian Bible.
This ancient list of ingredients does not just add a legacy to this loaf but challenges our understanding of what bread can be, removing many extraneous sugars and filling diets with fiber, protein, and legumes.
The beans in the bread have been said to make it a cleansing dish, but if you are less interested in an intestinal cleaning, you can substitute a number of alternative ingredients so that the bread is more to your liking.
Let’s get started with the basic recipe for Ezekiel bread.
Ezekiel Bread Recipe
Ingredients
- 2 packets of active, dry yeast
- 4 cups water, warm
- 1 ½ cups spelt flour
- 2 ½ cups wheat berries
- ½ cup barley
- ½ cup millet
- ¼ cup green lentils, dried
- 2 tbsp great Northern beans, dried
- 2 tbsp kidney beans, dried
- 2 tbsp pinto beans, dried
- 1 cup honey
- ½ cup olive oil
- A pinch of salt
Process
Pre-heat your oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit; it’s not what the Hebrews had originally, but we’ll let that slide.
Place all of the water, honey, olive oil, and both packets of yeast (roughly .5 ounces) into a bowl, and let the mixture sit, without stirring, for four to six minutes.
In a separate bowl, combine the wheat berries, spelt flour, barley, millet, green lentils, great Northern beans, kidney beans, and pinto beans.
Grind with a mortar or a flour mill until the mixture is uniform.
After letting the yeast mixture sit for four to six minutes, add the above combination and salt to the mixture, and stir for about ten minutes. The dough should appear batter-like without noticeable lumps.
Grease two 9×5 bread pans and pour the mixture into each. Let the batter rise at room temperature for an hour or until it has risen to crest the top of the pans. The dough should not be spilling over the edges of the pans.
Bake the loaves for fifty minutes. The finished loaves should be a warm brown.
Alternatives to the Ezekiel Bread Recipe
If you want to personalize your loaf of Ezekiel bread, you can add raisins to the loaf once it’s been mixed to smoothness.
This addition will give your loaf an extra kick of sweetness that will make it even more delicious to eat before you go to work in the morning.
Alternatively, you can add any number of dried chunks of fruit in order to add texture and healthy, sweet flavor.
If the number of beans in this loaf is off-putting to you, you can substitute the beans for equal measurements of chickpeas.
This alternative changes the texture of the bread and makes the flavor a little different from that of the basic recipe, but it still offers up a healthy alternative to others available at the grocery store.
In Conclusion
Ezekiel bread is a unique loaf with a long history that is shown in its ingredients as well as in its many variations.
Making a loaf of this bread in your home takes a little bit of muscle and patience, but the result will be a delicious, healthful treat for you to eat at any time of day, with any kind of spread, and with all sorts of additional treats.
It is easy to personalize, and the benefits, as opposed to less healthy alternatives, are evident from its ingredients list to the final product.
Do you have any tips on making ezekiel bread?