So we dried the mesquite beans in the oven and ground them up into flour. It appears this is to be the easy part. I made bread with the flour, and while it wasn’t a total fail, it didn’t turn out as well as I would have liked.

Most recipes online suggest mixing both mesquite flour with regular flour and I believe I understand why now. I used my normal bread recipe which makes two loaves of bread. I proofed my yeast and it was good. Put all the ingredients into the mixer and let it go. Once it was all mixed well, I put it on the stove to rise for an hour and this is where things went bad.

The dough didn’t rise at all! It was like the yeast didn’t work with this flour. But we wanted to see how it would taste so I went ahead and put it in the pans and baked anyways.

I think this is the ugliest loaf of bread I had ever made. The dough was still very sticky and didn’t work with me at all. So this is what came out of the oven. The flavor is actually really good though so this is the only reason I didn’t call this a complete fail. I’m beginning to think that the mesquite flour may be something to use more in flat type breads that don’t require yeast, but more experimenting will need to be done on this before I consider this a complete fail.

Of course since the dough didn’t rise, the bread was very dense and not the airy bread that I am used to  but I expected this. As I said earlier though, the flavor was good and I can see using this is baked goods and different types of breads but maybe not for a sandwich bread.

Have a great day!

Renee