I’m always searching for a great bread for toasting that’s packed with grains, wheat and fiber. While I’m not really too happy with how this bread turns out, I figured I’d post it anyway as a starting point for future experimenting.

Schedule: I based this loaf off of my hybrid schedule.

Since this uses a big portion of natural yeast to ferment, I created a levain with my sourdough starter that was last fed 12 hours prior. This levain provides enough for this bread, plus extra to keep your starter going. The small amount of bakers yeast helps give a little boost to the rising of the bread.

I was a little worried how dense this bread would turn out due to the high amount of adjuncts in here. I already knew the wheat bran can greatly reduce rising due to it interfering gluten development. Oats and flaxmeal are also extremely dense when wet as well.

30 minutes before mixing the bakers yeast and salt into the dough, I performed an autolyse by mixing the oats, wheat bran, flaxmeal, water, levain and flour together.

Ingredients:

Levain

Started at 7:30am with the following ingredients. Mix everything together and loosely cover and let it ferment for about 8 hours.

• 28g unfed sourdough starter (last feeding was 12 hours prior)
• 138g filtered water @ 85-90’F
• 110g bread flour
• 28g King Arthur whole wheat flour

Dough

• 410g bread flour
• 328g filtered water @ 90-95’F
• 180g levain
• 12g sea salt
• 1/4 tsp yeast
• 70g quick oats
• 45g flaxmeal (ground flax seed)
• 15g wheat bran

Method:

After mixing in the salt and yeast, I performed 4 stretch and folds within the first 2 hours. The dough was extremely stiff and stretching proved extremely difficult. The dough bulk fermented at room temperature for about 5 hours.

I proofed the dough overnight in the refrigerator in a banneton which was wrapped in a plastic bag.

The next morning I woke up, preheated the oven and then I baked the loaf in a preheated dutch oven at 450’F for 38 minutes covered, then removed the lid of the dutch oven and baked for an additional 18 minutes.

Result:

The dough proofed well enough in the refrigerator overnight, but it was still extremely dense. Due to being so dense, it didn’t rise too well in the oven, however, it wasn’t flat.

The color of the crust is mostly brown with lots of the wheat bran and flaxmeal visible. The crumb is extremely compact but has a nice visual appeal filled with texture.

When eating it, the bread is extremely dense. It will make fine toast, but it isn’t going to be very light. There’s also too much of the flax flavor coming through for my liking.

Thoughts for next time:

I think next time I’ll use whole flax seeds that have been soaked, instead of using flaxmeal. I’ll also probably drop the quantity of both the flax seeds and the wheat bran by about half and then use that as the next starting point.

My Baking Notes

• Ambient temperature: 70’F
• Started autolyse @ 3:00pm
• Water temp: 92’F
• Dough was 84’F at autolyse
• Mixed @ 3:35pm
• Dough was 79’F after mixing
• 4 stretch and folds in first 2 hours
• Started proof @ 8:20pm
• Preheated oven @ 6:00am the next morning
• Into oven @ 6:50am