Flax and sunflour bread - for great rising!

A simple but successful bread, made with flax flour and sunflour. After doing some testing of various flours (results to be posted later when I've tested the rest of my 12 different flours) and looking through my notes, I came to the conclusion that almond flour, even the fine varieties, is just not good for bread. So I used sunflower seed flour (sunflour) instead of the almond flour, plus I added just a bit (0.5% by weight) of baker's malt, which supposedly helps feed the yeast. The result was just excellent - rose like a charm, and did an oven spring I could palpably watch happening.


I also this time put it into a hot oven, rather than as usual heating the oven with the bread in it. I still don't know which gives the better result - it seems to me the slow heating would allow the inner parts to get warmer and expand before the outer parts get too baked and fixed, but maybe that's not an issue, and the loss of gas by slower heating is counterproductive.

Another sneaky tricky I just realized is to use the LeKue to help shape the read. I wasn't quite able to make it full-length in there, but by pushing it around I managed to make a good shape that when flipped into the loaf pan I could cut very easily. Thus the nice two-way cuts you see in the result.


It became brown very fast, so I covered the top with foil after 35 minutes. I should probably put it in a lower rack in the oven to prevent that, or maybe it's just the baker's malt that's adding enough caramelization to make it brown. After all, that's one of the purposes it's used for.

I also tried some pancakes from The Gluten-Free Almond Flour Cookbook, but I had to do some substitution, and they turned out awful. I'm starting to have misgivings about almond flour in general.

Upon cutting open the bread, I find it fluffy and springy. Not quite the largest bubbles I've seen, but definitely satisfactory, and the taste was quite nice, a bit more mellow than it's otherwise been with flax seed flour. The texture is maybe a bit chewy, but certainly has that airiness that makes it pleasant to eat, rather than the dense lumps I've had with almond flour.



Ingredients: 125g gluten, 100g flax flour, 100g sunflour, 75g whole wheat flour, 100g all-purpose flour, 1/2 tsp baker's malt (Backmalz), 360g lukewarm water, 20g yeast, 2 eggs, a splash of canola oil, and 50g seeds soaked in boiling water and drained. Dry ingredients mixed in LeKue bowl, wet ingredients mixed separately, then added and stirred, then kneaded for about 5 minutes. First rise for 1 hour, second rise about 45 minutes, baked 1 hour at 200C.


Comments

  1. Sara Adams5 February 2019 at 06:02

    As discussed, I've added the recipe here: https://www.datayoureat.com/r/_i7-vNsjXoTj/Flaxseed_and_Sunflower_Bread

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My Ikea Hack Workbench

Image
I needed a new workbench. One where my printer could live, where tools and spare parts could be organized, but also where the work surface wouldn't get cluttered or take too much of the space in my room. I started looking around at secretaries and similar, which have the right concept, but never the right size. Eventually I realized I had to do it myself. These are my notes. I used an IKEA Hemnes side table, two Hemnes night stands, and the top part of the two-part Hemnes writing desk. The two night stands on top of the side table, and the writing desk part on top of them, like the cross slab of a megalith, done in wood plank furniture. That part was simple enough, except I didn't want the gaps under the night stands, so I cut a bit of the logs, but cut too much, so now I need to fill some gaps. I'll probably print something eventually. But here's the basic setup: Hemnes, Hemnes everywhere. But they are clearly not designed to go together like these, the sizes don...
Read more

Bullet Journals Without the Pastels

Image
Late last year,  +Riona MacNamara  introduced me to the idea of  bullet journals , and I decided to give it a try over Christmas. It worked out for me and has seriously helped me getting shit done, without a snowfall of post-it notes to keep track of things (I have graphs and data to back this claim up, see the Statistics section). There are  many   pages   describing   bullet   journals , most of them showing intricately decorated journals done in pastels. If you're allergic to pastels, or don't have time to decorate your planner, here's my explanation. Guaranteed no florals - hell, I can't even do a straight line. Task Tracking Here are the three parts of my bullet journal I use the most, the task tracking parts. It has three levels: generic future tasks roughly by month, tasks for the current month, and tasks for today. The  future tracker  is where you keep tasks that you want to get around to eventually, but either don't have t...
Read more

Almond flour isn't just almond flour

Image
Looking around on the internet for how much almond flour to use instead of regular flour, I kept finding big variations, from 1:1 replacement to 1:2. Since baking is fairly finicky with the amount of ingredients, this confused me. But when I grabbed an extra bag of almond flour at the local grocery store (yes, there are specialty flours at the grocery store here), I noticed a difference in consistency and decided to take a closer look. Here's a close-up of the two flours using a macro lens. On the left is MeaVita Mandelmehl, on the right Borchers Premium Mandelmehl. In both cases, I've used a blunt instrument to gently distribute the flour to better see the difference. The flour on the left, the MeaVita brand flour, is in much larger chunks than on the right. The MeaVita flour also feels more moist, though I don't know if that's a direct effect of the size or because more oil has been extracted from the Borchers flour. It is, however, obvious that the two flour...
Read more