The Fresh Loaf

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Sourdough Bran Bread

December 19, 2020 - 2:24pm

HungryShots

Sourdough Bran Bread

Sour bran bread

This is a bread with a special ingredient, fermented bran and cornflour. It is what remains from making borsh. This thick mixture is your new borsh starter, called husti in Romanian. Romania has a tradition in using it for diets, traditional home medicine and even for beauty treatments. Why not adding it in bread then?

First, this is the recipe for making borsh and sour bran/husti: http://www.hungryshots.com/2020/10/borsch-sourdough-starter.html

So, when you make the borsh you use the liquid. That is the borsh. To get the liquid, you strain the entire mixture and what it remains is a fermented mixture of wheat bran, cornflour and pieces of rye bread.

This thick mixture is your new borsh starter, called husti in Romanian. But you'll only keep a jar of it for the next batch and the rest you can discard.

I started then thinking about what this mixture is and how it will affect my dough. First thought was on humidity. First, it needed to be squeezed well well. Even squeezed, but it will add humidity to my dough. So the amount of water added initially in the dough needs to be kept low.

Then, this is bran and cornflour. Bran is a barrier in gluten network development, so it should be added a bit later in the dough. The best moment for this is the lamination phase. Bran is also already hydrated so this is already good. The cornflour, with its grainy structure, has no gluten. The bran as well, it should be added in the dough at a later stage.

This mixture also contains sourdough bacteria. This means that when added in the dough it will increase its population.

With this in mind, I prepared a recipe using white strong wheat flour with hydration of ~70%. The moment of adding the sour bran was for sure no earlier than the lamination phase.

The plan was made, so it only remained to put it into practice.