August 19, 2022 - 10:04am
FWSY Harvest Bread with Poolish - Sub for Wheat Bran
First time poster here ...I'm making Ken Forkish's Harvest Bread with Poolish for the first time. It contains 10% WW, 5% wheat germ and 2% wheat bran. It also suggests coating the loaf in wheat bran for crunch. I have wheat germ but not wheat bran.
Should I just substitute the wheat germ for wheat bran or could I use something like flax seeds or ground up rolled oats?
Also for the top, any suggestions for a nice crunchy topping without wheat bran? In my pantry I have flax seeds, wheat bran, rolled oats, sesame seeds, poppy seeds and caraway
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First, welcome to TFL.
A couple of years ago I posted a blog about this bread (https://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/57196/harvest-bread-fwsy), which I have made several times. You can omit the coating, which I found to be more trouble than benefit the one time I attempted it. As for leaving out the wheat bran from the crumb, I suspect that things will still be okay.
Be sure to follow up and post your results (a photo of the crust and another of the crumb would be helpful if you want feedback).
Lastly, as I mentioned in my blog, keep an eye on the dough (and not the clock). This dough goes very quickly from one stage to the next.
Happy baking.
Ted
Thanks Ted!
I left out the bran from the dough, but picked some up before baking so I added it to the crust.
A few mistakes along the way but it has a nice texture and flavor anyway. It's quite flat and there could be a few reasons. I forgot to do the folds. It also got a bit stuck in the bannaton and lost a bit of its shape. I'm sure it doesn't help that my dutch oven is really big so it doesn't force the dough up. Coincidentally I just picked up Bittman bread from the library and since i always have issues with ky bannaton, I'm going to try his no-bannaton method
My first whole wheat loaf and I'm excited to try again.
Going into the oven:
Finished baking
Crumb