V8 Juice Whole Wheat Herb Bread with Rice

V8 Juice Whole Wheat Herb Bread with Rice 

based on Drews Tomato Juice Bread Recipe

Why Tomato Juice in Bread?
I've been thinking about soaking some rice in tomato juice and incorporating it into a bread for some time now, but just never got around to it before today.

Now I had the rice from some leftovers of dinner a couple of days ago.

 

And I had the juice -- not tomato juice, but V8 juice, one of my guilty pleasures.  I soaked the rice in the V8 juice in the fridge for a couple of days.

Today, it was time to make bread.  But what recipe should I use?

After exhausting my bread books (I thought for sure that there would be a bread made from Tomato Juice somewhere, but there wasn't) I had a look on the Internet, where you can find anything.

Most of the tomato juice breads I found used mostly bread flour or all purpose flour.  There were a few that had some whole wheat flour though, and these were worth a look to me.  Most of them incorporated herbs of various types that go well with tomatoes (basil was the most frequent herb used).  It would be a hard choice narrowing it down to one recipe.

Here are few representative web sites I looked at.  This isn't exhaustive, it is just from near the top of Google today:

• Barta's Tomato Juice Bread, at AllRecipes.com
• Yetter's V8 Juice Bread, at About.com
• Nelson's Sourdough Tomato Juice Bread at AllRecipes.com
• Tomato Juice Bread at Cooks.com
• Good's Tomato Ketchup Bread at FoodReference.com
• Geema's Tomato Paste Milk Bread at FamilyOven.com
• Sackville's Tomato Juice Bread at Food.com
• Jane Brody's Tomato Juice Bread from "Good Food Book: Living the High-Carbohydrate Way" thanks to Google Books

One curious fact that continuously emerged as I read through many of these recipes is that the tomato juice was warmed, or scalded.  I wondered if it was the same reason that milk is scalded in bread recipes -- i.e., the proteins in the liquid interfere with the gluten formation (or so I've read).  At any rate, it seemed like a pretty good idea to follow the crowd on this idea.


My Recipe is Based on Drews Tomato Juice Herb Bread
The recipe that I based my tomato rice herb bread on was found not at any of the sites listed above, however, but it was a recipe from Drews of Worcester Tomato Juice.  Their recipe for a Tomato Juice Herb Bread seemed to me to be the most interesting and most easily translated to a complete 100% whole wheat bread.  Their bread also has parmesan cheese added to it, but I skipped that.

I was sorry I didn't have any Drews of Worcester Tomato Juice to try in the recipe, but I had some V8 juice, so I was on my way.  Check out their site for the volumetric amounts of ingredients.




Ingredients
Here is a list of ingredients that I used, by weight:

• 747g V8 Juice 85-100 degrees F.
• 8g Yeast
• 70g Honey
• 1 Egg
• 612g Whole Wheat Flour
• 10g Kosher Salt
• 50g Olive Oil
• another 612g Whole Wheat Flour
• 6g Italian Seasoning
• 6g Vegetable Seasoning
• 1g (2 Tbsp dried) Purple Basil
• 177g (1 c) Soaked Rice

Method
For the complete method of the original recipe, check out the Drews Tomato Juice Site.  I changed things only slightly, to incorporate my rice and seasonings.

Place the V8 on the stove and heat until just over 85 degrees F.

Take it off the heat, sprinkle the yeast on top, stir it in, add honey and an egg beaten with a fork.

Add the first amount of flour, one cup at at time, stirring it in one direction until it is all completely mixed.

Cover 45 minutes in the Excalibur Dehydrator on bread setting.

Pour oil on the dough and sprinkle salt on top.

Fold the dough (the dough really feels quite interesting, being folded in the bowl with a spatula), and keep folding while you add the herbs, and then 3 cups of the rest of the flour, 1 cup at at time.

At this point, I decided to divide the dough, and have one dough be the 'control' and the other be the one with rice in it.  Each half of the dough weighed 981g at this point.

1. The Control Bread merely had the last 1/2 cup of whole wheat added and folded in.

2. The Rice Bread had 1 cup of soaked rice added, as well as 1/2 cup of whole wheat.

The herbs went on last, but were also folded/kneaded in.

I wasn't sure that the Rice Bread would take both the rice and the complete amount of whole wheat, but the soaked rice actually added a fair bit of hydration to the dough, and so the dough really required more whole wheat to be added.  I had no trouble incorporating it into the dough.

The doughs were bulk fermented in the Excalibur warmth for 1 hour.

Then I folded them in the bowl until they were boules, and I placed them in flour-lined baskets to proof for 45 minutes longer.

They rose at room temperature this time.

I did not paint the crust with butter, and I did not score the loaves.  They were very fragile.

the basket has been upended on the peel, and the cloth is still over the dough

the cloth is carefully removed before the dough goes into the oven: this dough is fragile!

I slid them onto a hot stone in the oven at 350 degrees F for 60 minutes, with steam.  After 25 minutes in the oven, I sprayed mist into the oven to prevent the tops from scorching, but I probably shouldn't have bothered.  The oven wasn't baking at an extremely high temperature anyway.  They were fine.

two loaves baking on 1 1/2 round pizza stones

The loaves smell great when baking.  My wife came home and thought she smelled pizza cooking.  She was not happy that it was 'only' bread again.

I took the loaves out to the picnic table to take some pictures in better light. 
Earlier I had been removing some scarlet runner bean seeds from dried pods, getting them ready for planting.

Results
Nice loaves.  We cracked into the non-rice loaf for dinner, with some soup, and I couldn't stop eating it.  It tasted good with a bit of cheese, it is good with soup, it tastes okay with jam, and it toasts okay.  I like this bread.  I hope the rice loaf is as nice as this one.

The Rice Loaf


The next morning I sliced into the rice loaf, and I have to admit I was a bit disappointed.  Sure, the same flavour was apparent, the nice tomato and herb scent, and the crumb was similar.  But the rice didn't really show up within the crumb like I'd hoped.  In retrospect, what did I expect?  The hydration liquid that I used was the same as what I'd used when soaking the basmati rice.  So it coloured everything.

But I was also hoping for some nice texture (the chemists call it 'mouth feel'), in using the rice, and this just didn't happen.  Perhaps the soaking was too long, and softened the rice too much, who knows?  But it didn't feel that way to the touch: the rice kernels still had a bit of hardness to them between thumb and forefinger before baking.  In the bread, though, they simply seemed to disappear.  And they definitely softened the bread, making it a bit crumblier.

As for the taste, it is very similar to the other loaf, although I'd have to say it is a trifle more starchy.  That could also be because I used a bit more flour here, which ultimately means less of a ratio of the flavouring herbs.  It doesn't taste bad at all -- it just takes away slightly rather than adds to it.  So in this sense it is a bit of a failure.  Perhaps if I had used brown rice?  Or soaked it in a different liquid?  Or what if I had coated them in (darker) tomato paste and parmesan cheese (keeping with the pizza theme) instead of soaking them?  There is lots more to try here, if I want.

Notes to Myself

• You could add goat cheese, instead of parmesan.  But it doesn't need either.
• You could add some sun dried tomatoes in oil to this bread, folding it in at the last moment.  That would work nicely.  But again, the loaf doesn't really require it.  Tastes fine the way it is.
• I'd have to say that the rice loaf was a slight failure, but I'm really glad I tried this recipe.  It has taught me a new way to gently form the whole wheat gluten, a quite unique method (i.e. you use half of the flour with the yeast and all of the hydration first to develop a very wet gluten structure in the bulk fermentation (the egg that is added early might also provide some structure to this wettest of doughs); then you sprinkle on oil, and salt, and begin folding it in and gently folding in the rest of the flour a cup at a time).  I'd like to try this method on other breads, because it works great.