Seriously, check out my personal home-made Anytime Coffee Cake made with silky spelt flour, which is pictured above. Unless you don't believe that I made that, you can hardly deny that the flour behaved perfectly. But furthermore, it tastes wonderful--not "wheaty" like you sometimes encounter when you use whole-wheat flour to make a recipe such as cookies. Even whole-wheat pastry flour can do that to you, although many recipes nowadays are written for it. But if you switch over to spelt flour for baked goods, you will have no trouble with your quick breads.
Now just hang on until I can get going with the soaker-sponge bread method, which I will probably do with the spelt flour as sponge and all-purpose flour for soaker. Right now I have a loaf of straight-up spelt bread that needs to be used up.
Go to Sprouts in Tucson to get this wonderful flour--I don't know how many years I have passed it up because I didn't know anything about it. If you are gluten-intolerant, you have probably already given up even thinking about baking with "bread flour," which has the highest protein content of any flour. That is why I am going to combine the spelt flour with the all-purpose flour and see if I can get it to rise.
I am thinking that the probability is that the actual rising time will need to be increased, and I am prepared to do that. It is no problem to substitute an hour and a half for an hour, and the only thing you really need to do is wait a little longer to turn your oven on (to avoid wasting fuel).
We do have a tendency to overlook the things that sound kind of weird, like "ancient grains" when we assume that somebody must have improved on them by now. But if the food industry is not restrained, they will attack old-fashioned, good nutrition and hype it up for longer shelf life and protection against spoilage. Lest we forget: the aim of the food industry is to get as much food sold as possible. That means get it from the point of harvest or slaughter to the shelves, and the devil take the hindmost.
I am proud of my rising consciousness in the wheat department, though I have been buying such things as organic cornmeal and oatmeal for years. At Safeway or Fry's Supermarkets in Tucson I look for McCann's Irish Oatmeal; I have stopped buying "quick" oats and stick to the recognizable rolled and cut grain.
If you would prefer oats that cook quickly, but are not processed to the point that Alton Brown pointed out last week when he did a show about oatmeal, you can always place some in a food processor and grind it a little further. Even your trusty Quaker Oats will go through the process just fine, and they will then make a smoother porridge.
Originally I thought that quick oats were simply sliced a little thinner than the regular oats that you get in the typical oatmeal package. However, if I understand Brown correctly, quick oats are made from dried, chopped oatmeal in an entirely different process. Well, that changes things considerably; if it is true we don't want to go farther than rolled oats. I am not entirely clear on whether quick oats have been cooked this way, so for the present I will continue to pulse regular rolled oats to keep them as close to nature as possible. I think it is a problem of labeling; I want to know what is in those packages.
The big divide is between rolled oats and the steel-cut variety, although you can absolutely make a divine porridge with those gritty little guys.
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