Today I continued my bread baking of a whole grain rye bread with flax.
The sponge: After rising in the refrigerator all night, the sponge was supposed to have doubled in size. It didn’t. I don’t really think it rose much at all. Next time I’ll take more notice of where the mixture starts out before I put it into the refrigerator, so that I can tell more about how much it has risen. Still, it had lots of time to develop flavors. At least I hoped it had. So, I went ahead and used the sponge as Peterson’s recipe said to.
Here are the changes I made in the flours used:
Peterson’s Mine
2 ½ cup rye flour 2 ¼ cup rye flour
2 ½ cup all-purpose flour 2 cups whole wheat flour
½ cup finely ground flax seeds
¼ cup gluten
As I’ve said before in my Blog, I am trying to avoid any use of white flours, which apparently is not good for diabetics. Plus, I added the flax for more fiber, which apparently is a good thing for diabetics (and probably all of us). [Anyone who has experience on these matters is welcome to comment!]
Since I haven’t made Peterson’s bread using the all-purpose flour, I can’t really say how my loaves (I made 2 small loaves: 1 baugette-like and one boule/round) differed from what he intended.
However, I can say that we enjoyed the bread quite a bit. Notice that there wasn’t much left of the baguette-like loaf to even get much of a picture!
Whole Grain Rye Bread with Flax
We ate the bread warm from the oven – after an appropriate, but agonizingly long wait for the bread to cool. Very difficult to wait when one is hungry! I had to use a timer to keep an especially hungry bread enthusiast at bay!
While this bread has quite a bit of flax in it, we couldn’t detect any change in taste due to its addition. I also didn’t think it affected the texture of the bread. So, basically, in this case it seems that the flax was a good addition: adding to the bread’s fiber content, yet not changing the nature of the whole grain rye bread itself.
Question: Have you added flax to your breads? What kind of results did you get? What adaptations to the original recipes did you think you had to make to include the flax and why?
Happy baking!
Pam's Bread 