Sourdough Ezekiel Bread

When it comes to sourdough bread baking, I often enjoy a challenge and today for a bit of additional fun, I am making an Old Testament recipe using ingredients, that when baked are, known as Ezekiel Bread. Ezekiel, who was an Old Testament Prophet, warned the Jewish Nation of their impending doom and advised a food storage program of sorts.

“Take thou also unto thee wheat, and barley, and beans, and lentils, and millet, and fitches [spelt], and put them in one vessel, and make thee bread thereof…”

Ezekiel Chapter 4, verse 9, King James Old Testament

But that set of ingredients, is pretty far from the modern health food known as Ezekiel Bread, which is made from sprouted grains So what’s the big deal with this commercial Ezekiel Bread?

April Benshosan, in Eat This, Not That! says:

“One slice of Ezekiel bread is only 80 calories and loaded with micronutrients and macronutrients that’ll keep you satiated and can help you lose weight or stay healthy. Plus, its ingredient list is totally pronounceable because it contains 100 percent wholesome good-for-you ingredients.”

When I read this claim, it sounded a lot like what Martha Levie, Abigail’s Oven Chief Baker, has to say about the health benefits of Abigail’s Oven Sourdough Bread. The difference is that commercial Ezekiel Bread sprouts its grains to minimize problems that are associated with whole grains, while Abigail’s Oven accomplishes this through long fermentation time periods for their sourdough bread.

Both processes make the grain more digestible without intestinal distress. And both methods minimize antinutrients, like phytic acid, from blocking vitamin and mineral absorption during digestion.

So the question is, is it the mix of wheat, barley, beans, lentils, millet, and spelt, that somehow makes this bread more nutritious? Historically, research shows Ezekiel’s prophetic advice to be centered on the fact, that there would not be enough of any one type of grain to make good bread. And as Larry Yarbrough, a religion professor at Vermont’s Middlebury College, explained:

“This is real bread, but it’s not good bread… [becasue] there’s not enough of any one [kind of] flour to make it, so they’re making bread with whatever they can get a hold of. That’s what these grains are.”

Yarbrough explained that “good bread” would be made with “choice flour, oil, and honey.” So with his advice, I recently tried to adapt a Crusty Sourdough Greek Horiatiko Psomi using the whole grains Ezekiel listed, but with the additions Yarbrough says make bread good. However, the results were not light, it was rather dense.

So I moved back to our trusted Abigail’s Oven Ancient Grain recipes to see if I could get a better crumb, taste, and texture. And it worked, at least based on Chef Martin’s comment at Thermoworks. He stated that this bread is much better than the Ezekiel Bread you can purchase in stores, which for me means good eating.