boiled bran bread
I'm not a regular reader of these forums but I wanted to pass along this idea of mine that I've been using.
If you've ever used wheat bran you know it's bitter and doesn't taste good. In bread recipes it also cuts the gluten. On a whim I tried soaking and rinsing it and that helps. Next I tried boiling it, in a lot of water like you'd do with noodles, and rinsing it. I boil it for at least 5 minutes. The water will be brown and cloudy. You need to rinse it until the rinse water runs clear. The strainer for this doesn't need to be as fine as you might think because the bran flakes swell up when boiled. After you rinse it use the back of a spoon to press out as much water as you can. Then you can use it wherever.
I've been using it in a quick bread recipe (i.e., not yeast raised) and the flavor is great. But I'm using so much bran that it doesn't rise at all, which doesn't bother me since I like heavy breads The bread I'm making cuts easily and isn't too crumbly.
One obvious downside to this method is the water retained in the bran. You could weight it before you boil it and then weigh it after you press out as much water as you can to figure out how much water has been retained. Or you could go by the feel of the dough. And the whole boiling, rinsing, and pressing is a lot of bother. But if you need lots of fiber like I do, it's a very nice way of getting it.
I'd be curious if people could try using boiled bran in regular yeast bread recipes and see how it works.
out and feed that to a small amount of starter to make the SD levain for just about all of my breads. Since it takes 12 hours to do a 3 stage levain and then i refrigerate it for 24-48 hours the bran is pretty much as soft as can be and i didn't notice it effecting the crumb, spring or bloom at all. The levain loves the bran hard bits and really takes of because all of the minerals in the bran
I've also toasted bran with wheat germ and sifted out middlings to make Toadies and then scaled them for 10 minutes to soften them, Scalding and or boiling bran and other parts of the grain to make a porridge or gruel as Janet Cook likes to call it, is a pretty standard bread making technique and C. Robertson uses it in Tartine.
Happy bread making in 2015
Thanks for your comment.
Softening the bran is only one part of what my procedure addresses. A significant advantage I suspect is the washing away the bitterness. I'm also adding additional bran to the quick bread I'm making. I'm using Michael Ruhlman's quick bread recipe from his book Ratio: 2 parts flour, 2 parts liquid, 1 part egg, and 1 part fat. With a large egg at 50 grams that gives you 200 grams of flour for 2 eggs. You can combine the egg and liquid and consider it 3 parts liquid and then use more eggs, so I'm using 3 eggs (about 150 grams) and then adding enough milk to bring it to 300 grams. For the bran I use 200 grams dry before it's boiled, rinsed, and squeezed, so that's a lot of bran. If it hadn't been boiled and rinsed the bread would probably taste rather unpleasant because of the bran's bitterness. Luckily the water left in the bran works out to just about the right amount to keep the batter the right consistency. And I work hard at pressing out as much water as I can.
So adding bran to the ratios of the recipe it would be 2 parts bran, 2 parts flour, 2 parts liquid, 1 part egg, and 1 part fat. For a yeast raised bread that would probably be too much; 1 part bran might work. But that was the point of my post, to pique someone's curiosity and to try this, for supplementing a regular loaf of bread with bran. And it might be better to start with white flour so that you factor out the effects of the bran that's in whole wheat flour.