So, I’ve been talking about the yummy sandwiches I’ve been making with flax bread. The bread is really easy to make if you have a dehydrator. If you don’t have a dehydrator and want to try it, you can fake it by putting your oven on low and leaving the door open.

Ingredients:
2 cups of flax seeds
2 cups of water
1/2 teaspoon salt
lots of herbs and spice!

Okay, you want LOTS of herbs and/or spices because they are competing with the flavor of flax seeds which seem to like to suck up all flavor. So if you’re using fresh herbs, you want a cup or three of them and if you’re using dried herbs, you want several tablespoons. It will seem like you’re using a LOT of flavoring and that’s because you are. But you will be glad you did.

First grind the flax seeds in a coffee grinder and put them in a mixing bowl. You’ll probably have to grind the seeds in about six batches to fit them all in the grinder. You want to grind until the sound changes so that you have got the seeds nice and powdery.

Add the salt and your flavors to the bowl. You can use any combination of spices you like. Tonight I made a Tex-Mex batch of bread and I used two tablespoons of garlic powder, one very heaping tablespoon of cumin, one very heaping tablespoon of chili powder and a healthy dash of cayenne pepper. Then I sneezed about eight times. If you use fresh herbs, you want to chop them small first.

Stir the salt and spices together with the ground flax until well mixed. Add two cups of water and mix well again. Go check your e-mail. (Or otherwise do something that takes ten to fifteen minutes for the flax to drink up the water.)

Come back and make a big ball of flax dough. If it’s too dry (not likely but it could happen) add more water (slowly! like a tablespoon at a time.) If it’s too wet, don’t worry because the wet will dehydrate out anyway – it will just be squooshier to spread it out.

You’ll need four dehydrator trays and you’ll need to cover them with non-stick sheets. Divide the flax dough into four parts and put one of them on a tray. Smear it out with your hands (it’s easiest if you get your hands wet first) and keep smooshing and working it out until it’s the biggest square you can make it without holes in it. It will be pretty flat and it will fill up most of the tray. You can sort of poke it with the “knife-edge” of the palm of your hand to shape it into a square.

Do this with all four of the balls of flax dough so that you have four big, flat squares of flax dough and then put them in the dehydrator at around 105 degrees for overnight. Whenever you get up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, flip them over. (Of course you can dehydrate these during the day as well, in which case look at them after four or five hours to see if they’re ready to flip.) They will flip nicely and won’t leave much mess on the non-stick sheets. Flip them onto the mesh tray cover and peel off the non-stick sheet. Then let them keep drying until morning (or for another four or five hours.)

You can cut each of those big squares into four pieces and make two sandwiches out of each big square. So you’ll have 16 slices of bread when you’re done and each slice will have approximately 100 calories and about 8 grams of fat (that’s a lot of fat, but it’s also chock full of omega essential fatty acids that are sooooooo good for you.)

Flax costs $0.58/pound in my grocery store (WinCo) and a cup of flax weighs 6 ounces so this batch of bread (not counting the herbs or spices) costs about fourty-four cents or three cents per slice! (If you want to count the dehydrating time, it’s about five cents an hour for 8-10 hours so say 94 cents a batch and about six cents per slice. Plus the cost of the seasonings. Which varies.)

And there you have it. The flax taste is a strong flavor, even with the spices mixed in, so if you don’t like flax, you won’t like this bread. I thought I wasn’t going to like it but once I put a bunch of sandwich stuff on it, it was so tasty!! It’s not really much of a sort of bread to munch on by itself but it’s great with other foods between two slices of it. I hope you enjoy it!

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