Whole Farro Wheat Bread

Dense, rich and earthy whole grain bread! Perfect with anything savory. I suppose it's also healthy, but that's not why I love it.

Source: Improvised, inspired by Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Dayand the German Seed Bread - Dreikernebrot

Taste: 5 (out of 5)
Difficulty: 2 (out of 5)

Ingredients:
- 3 cups of whey (or water or buttermilk)
- 2 tbsp lemon juice
- 1 1/2 tbsp active dry yeast
- 3 cups of white flour
- 3 cups of dark rye flour
- 1 cup of ground oats (I grind rolled oats with Magic Bullet)
- 2 tbsp ground caraway seeds
- 1 cup whole Farro wheat
- 1 1/2 tbsp salt
Total: 2 loaves

Directions:
1. Mix all ingredients, in whichever order you like (better not to put salt and yeast right after each other, salt tends to kill yeast). You can mix all the ingredients by hand or using a stand mixer, such as my beloved KitchenAid mixer. not using the mixer, it’s best to mix the ingredients in a large bowl with a lid (4 gallon ice cream bucket is perfect for this quantity).
2. Cover the bowl and let the dough rise at room temperature for 2 hours.
3. Then transfer the dough to the refrigerator and refrigerate overnight or up to 5 days, to help the flavors develop.
4. On the baking day, line two 9 x 4 inch loaf pans with parchment paper (otherwise it will be very difficult to extract the bread from them).
5. With wet hands, to prevent the dough from sticking, divide the dough in half, shape leach half loosely into loaf shape and place into the baking pan. The dough is more like a cookie dough, rather than bread, it is not stretchy at all, but don’t worry, the bread will be dense and will not be falling apart.
6. Cover the pans with wet kitchen towels or thick wet paper towels and let them rise at room temperature for an hour. After an hour start preheating the oven to 450F. It should take about 30 more minutes.
7. After 90 minutes of rising, when your oven is hot the bread is ready to go in. It might have risen or might not have. Don’t worry, it should rise more in the oven. If you have a baking stone, cover the loaf pans with more parchment paper and place the baking stone on top. This way the loafs with be denser and squarer and your sandwiches will be more uniform. I think I saw this trick on a Julia Child’s show, but I am not sure.
8. Place the loaves with or without the stone on the them into the oven. Place a small bowl with about 1 cup of hot water in the oven to keep the moisture up. Close the oven door and bake for 45 minutes.
9. Be careful when removing the pans with the hot stone from the oven. Let the bread cool on wire racks to room temperature before slicing and eating.

Afterthoughts
- I absolutely love this bread. I bake 2 loaves, slice them and freeze them, and then I take out one or 2 slices at a time and heat them in a toaster.
- The good thing is that this bread is so thick that you can easily cut it into very thin slices, so it lasts very long and you eat less calories.
- This bread is perfect with anything savory. Some of my favorite combinations are: coconut oil (or butter) and Jarlsberg cheese, farmers’ cheese and smoked salmon with dill and green onions, with green salad and sunny side up egg, with lentil soup, etc.