What Happened When I Made Up A Recipe? Wheat, Flax, and Chia Bread!

March 12, 2014 by Laurie Nguyen 42 Comments

You know how I said that I make my own bread?  Well, I do.  Most of the time.  Last week, it was really crazy, so I picked up some Oroweat at Costco for the boys.  They were quite happy, but did say that they like my bread better for “just eating,” meaning not for sandwiches or toast.  Buying bread for the boys allowed me to freedom to experiment with bread making this week, because I didn’t have to deal with complaints or “the look.”  They have their super, non-nutritious white bread, and I can experiment with super uber healthy whole grain bread.

 

As much as I love bread, I have some dietary restrictions, so I have to seriously limit how much I eat.  There’s a little more flexibility when I eat a true whole grain bread, so I decided to make some this week.  I pulled out my family cookbook (Thank you Erin for assembling this as a Christmas gift a few years ago), and looked at the wheat bread recipes.  They looked good, and I’m sure they were good, as they were my mother’s recipes, but they all made several loaves of bread.  I wasn’t sure if anyone else would eat the wheat bread, and I wanted to start small.

 

Rather than doing the smart thing and simply reducing the amount of ingredients and making less bread, I decided to wing it and completely change my favorite white bread recipe and make it a whole grain bread recipe.  That’s a risky thing to do!  But I am a “wing it” kind of gal.

 

Shall we see how “winging it” turned out this time?

 

Whole Grain Bread with Flax and Chia Seed.

(Adapted from Pound-it-Bread by Joan Miller)

 

1/2 cup raw honey (can use regular honey)

1 tablespoon molasses

2 tablespoons yeast

1/4 cup cream (or half-n-half, milk, evaporated milk, almond milk, etc.)

1 3/4 cup warm, not hot, water

1/4 cup flax seed, ground

1/4 cup chia seed

2 1/2 cups bread flour

2 cups whole wheat flour

1 tablespoon dough enhancer

1/4 cup vital wheat gluten

2 tablespoons salted butter, melted

2 teaspoons salt

 

Dissolve yeast in warm water mixed with some of the honey, and let sit for 5 minutes.  It should begin to “bloom” (see picture below).  Put remaining ingredients in bowl and add yeast when ready.  Mix well until all ingredients are moist and forms a ball.  Dump dough onto a floured surface and cut in half.  Form two lumps of dough.  Let them sit and rest for 15 – 20 minutes.  Pound each dough lump for one minute on a floured surface with a rolling pin.  Form into a loaf and put into a greaseed pan.  Let dough sit in pan and rise until the loaf is 1 inch over the top of the pan.  Place bread in preheated 400 degree F oven and bake for 10 minutes.  Place a piece of foil over the top of the loaves and cook for an additional 15-20 minutes, until done.  Total baking time is 25-30 minutes.

 

Now for the fun part…  The pictures!

 

Ingredients. Well, most of them.  See my little ziplock bag of whole wheat flour?  I used my Nutrimill to grind it*  from white winter wheat about a month ago.  I keep it in my freezer to keep it fresh, and I pull it out whenever I need whole wheat flour.

 

Can’t forget these babies!

 

Or these!

 

Or these…  Chia seed and ground flax seed

 

I ground 1/4 cup of flax seed in a coffee grinder. It measured a little over 1/4 cup after I ground it, but I put the entire amount in the dough.

 

Now, we can begin!!

 

Start with the yeast. Dissolve it into the water mixed with some of the honey. When the yeast has “bloomed,” it will look like this. When it does, it’s ready!

 

Next, add everything to your mixing bowl. I use a Kitchen-aid. You can use a Bosch or whatever mixer you have, or you can mix it by hand.  This is a heavy dough, so make sure your mixer can handle dough before you begin.

 

Mixing.  This needed a little more flour (as I initially only put in 2 cups of bread flour), so I added an additional 1/2 cup of bread flour (making 2 1/2 cups total as listed in the recipe).

 

And it turned out like this. This dough is not as wet as my white bread recipe.

 

Dumped it on a floured counter top.

 

 

Cut it in half and let it sit for a little over 15 minutes.

 

Here is the same dough 15 minutes later. See? It’s beginning to rise.

 

I pounded it out.

 

Then I shaped it into a loaf, but as you can see, it’s not very pretty. Is it? I should have just rolled up the dough to form the loaf, but I shaped it the way I do with a wetter dough. Next time, I’ll roll it for a prettier loaf.

 

Here’s the other one. Better, but not beautiful.

 

I let them rise for close to 40 minutes. They look better now, but, still, they’re not pretty.

 

Here they are 10 minutes into baking. I put foil on top to keep the loaves from getting too brown.  And boy!  It’s time to clean my oven!

 

Here they are, fresh out of the oven.

 

Not bad, but not the prettiest bread I’ve ever made. Of course, taste is king, so let’s see how it turned out.

 

The texture of the bread was really nice, but it is a tad bit too sweet (even for me and I like a sweeter bread). I forgot to account for the fact that honey is twice as sweet as sugar. I adjusted for it’s water content, but not the sweetness.

 

Overall, a decent bread.  Not my favorite, but definitely edible.  I’ll continue to tweak this recipe and let you know what I come up with.  I will most definitely be reducing the amount of honey.

 

If you’re interested in the nutritional content, here’s what “My Net Diary” told me.  Each slice has 150 calories, 4 grams of fat, 23 grams of carbs (with 4 of those from fiber), and 6 grams of protein.

 

What do you think? 

Do you have a favorite whole grain bread recipe?  I’d love it if you’d share it with me!

 

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