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

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