The wheat kernel explained by Vernice Rosenvall in Wheat for Man, 1975.

I was wandering through an antique store in Corning, Arkansas, when I ran across this marvelous manual for what I think is the original Rival Crock•Pot. The pamphlet is sadly not dated, not even with the year-like code that later Crock•Pot manuals would sport on the back cover. However, Rival’s version of the slow cooker was introduced in 1971.

What struck me about this particular printing of the pamphlet, however, is that it contained instructions for a “special Bread 'n Cake Bake pan”.

Our Bread ‘n Cake Bake pan makes a miniature oven of your Crock-Pot! It’s custom designed for marvelous, easy baking of cakes, breads, casseroles or baked potatoes… right in the Crock-Pot… Homemade breads give off that oldtime aroma and have that hearty taste. If you like yeast breads, the “batter” way is the better way. There’s no need to knead… and little waiting for dough to rise.

I of course immediately went to my usual vintage haunts looking for the “Bread ’n Cake Bake” and found one in great shape. It may have been easier nowadays than finding a two-pound coffee can suitable for baking. If you do want to go the full vintage route and use a coffee-style can, you might be able to use a not-quite-one-pound Cafe du Monde can, or a not-quite-two pound beans or tomatoes can.

To top it all off, the very first recipe for homemade bread in the Bread ’n Cake Bake section of this manual was for a graham flour bread. Grandma’s “Dark” Bread incorporates “½ cup whole wheat or graham flour” into the dough. I’ve been experimenting with graham flour this year, so it seemed the perfect place to start.

It was so good, I haven’t made any of the other breads in this section yet.

Graham flour is not readily available today. Most recipes—even this one—suggest using either graham flour or whole wheat flour. However, whole wheat flour is not quite the same thing. Graham flour is literally the whole flour. Whole wheat flour is more of the flour than white flour, but not the whole flour.

This information is very hard to find, but the impression I get is that some, if not most, modern whole wheat flours contain some of the germ, but rarely all of it. The germ contains a lot of fats, which vastly reduces the shelf-life of flour.

So I’ve started making my own graham flour in the blender. I’m not sure this is technically a flour, as it is not ground in the same way that flour is ground into flour. But it seems to work.

Homemade Graham Flour

Servings: 2
Preparation Time: 2 hours
Jerry Stratton
Wheat for Man: Why and How (Internet Archive)

Ingredients

• 6 oz hard red winter wheat berries

Steps

1. Spread wheat berries onto large baking sheet.
2. Bake at 225° for one hour.
3. Cool.
4. Grind in blender, and then blend for one minute until smooth as flour.
5. When a recipe calls for sifting, run grains that don’t sift through a coffee grinder and return to sifter.
6. Makes about one cup of graham flour.

I get my wheat berries from an Amish grocery store. Indian grocers often have white wheat berries, which provide a subtly different flavor.

The baking step might not actually be necessary, depending on your source of wheat berries and your blender. I do this not to cook the berries, but to be sure they’re dry enough to grind into a light flour. White wheat berries can be prepared the same way as red wheat berries.

Graham bread is a wonderful trip back to the seventies for National Sandwich Day. It’s a great, rich choice for bread-n-butter sandwiches, for roast beef, and especially for grilled cheese. And if, like me, you prefer to have your burgers and sloppy joes on slices of bread instead of buns, it’s great for that, too.

The Crock•Pot produces a beautiful round loaf.

A passable graham flour is easily made in a blender. (Click for video.)

Great with the All-Meat Chili Spread from the same book.

What a two pound coffee can looked like…

Sliced for game night.

This bread is a very easy one. There’s no kneading at all, neither by hand nor with a machine. Just a little blending, and even that with a very wet dough. And a nice thing about making it in a slow cooker is that the crockpot’s lower heat allows it to combine the bread’s rise with the actual baking. From start to finish you should have bread in well under four hours, comparable with a bread maker but without the embedded paddles.

National Sandwich Day is less than two weeks away, on Monday, November 3. Try making this very easy bread on the Sunday before if you’re looking for a sandwich idea for the day!