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 Making chabmey
For the most part, I followed the recipe just as it's presented. I did make a few changes, usually through necessity, and have some ideas for improving the process.
I used half the amounts given in the recipe: 16 oz./2 cups/.5 liters of wheat and 1/4th cup of flaxseed. This made enough chabmey to fill two good-sized baking pans.
The wheat berries were sprouted like you'd sprout any sort of grain or bean. The wheat tended to dry out quickly, so I did the "fill-drain" procedure in the morning and at night. I used filtered, purified water throughout the process. Since the chabmey are dried, any impurities in the water such as salts would tend to be concentrated in the final product, and I didn't want that.
It took only three days for the wheat berries to sprout. I planned to prepare the batter on the evening of the third day, so that morning I put the flaxseed to soak. Since the wheat again looked kind of dry, I covered it with water in the morning, but did not pour it out, and left it to sit all day, too.
I put enough water on the flaxseed to reach the 4 oz. mark on my measuring cup. I had been planning to rinse the flaxseed before I used it, but the seed absorbed the water and produced a gelatinous mass that I couldn't rinse off. Maybe flaxseed doesn't need to be rinsed. At any rate, I used the flaxseed just as it was from the cup. I did drain and rinse the wheat.
That evening, I "mashed" the wheat and seeds together at one time in a food processor. The result was coarser than a true mashed batter would be, but I don't have any utensils to mash that quantity of grains. Maybe it would have gotten smoother if I'd processed it longer (I only processed it for about 5 minutes total). It also occurs to me that longer processing might have introduced more air into the batter and made it lighter, too.
Instead of adding salt, I added Bragg's Liquid Aminos to the batter, as I was running it in the food processor. I used 2 tablespoons, but 3 might be better. I think it might be nice to add other flavorings, eg. garlic powder, sunflower seeds, various spices, or sesame seeds, at this time. You could probably also make a sweet chab by omitting (or cutting down on) the salt and using sweeteners and the appropriate spices.
I did not add any extra liquid beyond that mixed with the flaxseed mass or that the wheat had absorbed. That might be a good area to experiment with, to see how the batter changes consistency if you add water.
Wild speculation: If I were a Klingon making ro'qegh 'Iw chab (Rokegh blood pie), I would probably use the rokegh blood instead of water to soak the flaxseeds. Since blood tends to be salty, it might be possible to omit the Braggs. I don't know if rokegh blood is the only kind you can use in a chab, or if you can make other kinds, too.
The batter was refrigerated overnight, and the next morning, I scooped out balls of batter a little smaller than golf balls to make the chabmey. I formed them into rounds about ¼ inch thick and between 1.5 – 2 inches in diameter, and placed them on a non-stick baking pan. Since they won't spread out in baking, you can cram them close together. The texture of the batter is soft and a little sticky, but not hard to work with. The chabmey held together well on the pans.
I took the baking pans to work with me and put them in the upper deck of my back seat, right under the window. The day was bright and hot, but the sky was not cloudless. Nevertheless, the pans got too hot to touch, and the chabmey "cooked" fine. The uncured batter has a kind of green smell that is not entirely pleasant, but the chabmey lost that smell and filled the car with a subtle warm smell, not as strong as bread baking, but similar. I went out at lunchtime and turned each one over. I left them in the window until I left for the day.
Once the chabmey had dried, they tended to slide around on the baking pans, which was nerve-wracking on the drive home, so you might want to bring a pan with sides to put them in, if you do the same. (Of course, you could do the whole process at home. I don't think their little trip in the car was essential to their proper curing!)
The final product is very dry around the edges, but a little soft in the centers (probably due to the oil in the flaxseeds). They have a very interesting taste, mild and nutty, with hints of salt and sweet. Their texture is somewhat crunchy at the edges and chewy in the middle. They're very filling, but they don't weigh on your stomache. The original recipe said you can store them in a covered tin on the counter, but my wife made me put them in a container in the fridge, since they don't have any preservatives. They get really hard in the fridge, but soften when they return to room temperature.
UPDATE: I've recently discovered a cracker called Mary's Gone Crackers that seems to be made from a similar batter, only using rice. They're much thinner than my chabmey. If I
make these again, I might try making them about half as thick as I did this time. I would halve again the
quantities of wheat and flax, because 2 baking pans of chabmey at a time seems about right!
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