I tried adding some King Arthur Harvest grains mix (four grains (whole oat berries, millet, rye flakes, and wheat flakes) and four seeds (flax, poppy, sesame, and sunflower) to my "Overnight White" recipe.
The result is delicious, great crust, but crumb is a bit dense, my bulk ferment was quite slow and it seemed my proofing stalled after 90 min. It occurred to me that the weight of the grains may have retarded the rise.
I used 23% grain, 230g to a 1Kg AP white flour, perhaps too much?
I added the grains to the dry ingredients, before the autolyse and mixing.
Am I correct that this could have affected the rise and what would be a good starting point for a percentage of grains?
thanks,
Rob
The 20% was not contributing to the gluten' ability to form the nice crumb you are looking for, probably even sabotaging the development of the gluten structure. In future bakes I would cut back the whole grain addition to maybe 5% and if that works increase incrementally until you start seeing a denser crumb again.
Gerhard
You might also want to soak the grain for a while first too - they'll take up some of the moisture in the mix during the ferment and that might slow down the rise somewhat.
I make 2 variants of seeded loaves - one is an overnight slow risen sourdough - I just make that a bit wetter and let it get on with it - the other uses the same seed mix and a normal yeasted dough, but I soak the seeds overnight before mixing into the dough in the morning.
Soaking linseeds (flax) for a long time isn't always a good idea though - they go somewhat jelly-like!
I did a quick google on that mix and found: http://www.kingarthurflour.com/recipes/harvest-grains-bread-recipe
Interesting to note that they have quite a wet mix - about 80% hydration and that they also use flour improvers (usually vit. c to strengthen the gluten)
-Gordon
That's still a nice looking loaf though, and I bet it tastes quite wonderful! I would go along with Gordon and use a soaker for this type of bread but not, as he says, including the flax until later. That said, I'm not sure how the flakes would stand up to a long soak. You don't want them disappearing into the finished loaf too much.