The Wood-Fired Blog

Whole Wheat Oat Bran Bread with Flax Seed

Jul 20, 2012Posted by Forno Bravo

This is one of my better efforts so far. This is a standard whole wheat formula with 10% oat bran and 10% flax seeds.

Here is the formula:

800 grams whole wheat flour
200 grams white whole wheat flour
(that’s right, no refined flour)
100 grams oat bran
100 grams flax seeds
20 grams salt
10 grams yeast
25 grams olive oil
35 grams honey
750 grams water

I feel like I learned a couple of interesting things. As a general rule 10% seems to be a pretty good guideline for nuts and other hard, non water absorbing ingredients. I used 10% pine nuts the other day, and that also seemed to be a good ratio.

The second thing that worked out well was that I let my pizza oven temperature fall all the way to 515F before loading my bread. This required a bit a patience, which is usually not my strong suit, as well as timing for my loaves, and it all seemed to work out. My pizza oven was 515F at the start of the bake, and after a 25 minute bread bake, it was still about 450F. The bread’s crust is a warm brown and it is nice and thick and crunchy. That part is really nice.

Number three. I refrigerated my shaped boules in the banetons before loading them into my oven. Chilling down the loaves slowed down the fermentation process, and kept them loaves from over-proofing while the oven cooled down into a bread baking temperature zone. I’m gonna do that again

And finally, I really like the texture and taste of flax seeds. This is nice bread. Plus, flax seeds are supposed to be good for you. You can see the seeds, and how 10% distributed in this photo.

All in all, I am happy with the effort.

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