Not-so-low-carb bread

My recent breads have been of a good structure and have risen nicely, but have almost invariably fallen again when baked. I tried some variations in flour combination and amount of kneading, but to no avail. Then I thought, maybe there's just not enough there to keep up the holes made by (mostly) steaming water. After all, while I use 500g of flour with 350g of water, I also thereto add about 150g of mostly water in the form of eggs, plus up to 50ml of oil, and some water in the soaked seeds. That adds up. So for this bread, I decided to use less water and add more flour, to see if the dough would form up more and stand up better while rising.

I used 50g gluten, 150g wheat flour (type 550), 150g whole-wheat flour, and 150g sunflower seed flour, a scant tablespoon salt, 50g soaked seed mix, 50g walnuts, 300ml warm water, 20g yeast cake, 3 large eggs, and 20ml oil. Then while kneading, I added another 250g of the type 550 flour, getting the dough from super-sticky to only somewhat sticky. At least I could get the bits off my hands just by rubbing them together, rather than having to wash them extensively. The extra regular flour makes this a roughly 2:1 carb:protein balance, which is still not too bad.

A first rise of 45 minutes in an oven with the oven light on and covered with a warm, damp towel made the bread rise noticably, but not hugely:




I then kneaded it more and put it into a large buttered loaf pan for another 45 minutes rise in the oven.


I took off the towel before turning the temperature to 200˚ and let it bake for an hour. The result: A nice risen loaf of good size. It looked like there was some oven spring and then a corresponding collapse.


Good shape, good crumb, nice taste.


Next time, I'll probably start with 250ml water and only two eggs, but the same initial amount of flour.

Comments

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