When the going gets tough with the daily life of “shelter in place,” aka “stay at home,” without a certain end-date, making breads could be the best distraction. Getting my hands into the dough is shaping up to be one of my anxiety-reducing coping mechanisms. There are very few ingredients we need in making this bread other than time and patience. You might think breadmaking is hard. But the skills and knowledge in the breadmaking process can be easily ramped up — much easier than you’d think. Besides, we need all the resilience we can muster to weather the pandemic. The sunflower flaxseed bread requires high-extraction wheat flour, bread flour, whole-wheat flour and seeds to make. Let me explain the flour ingredients.
It might be tough for some to get all the flours when the stock in grocery stores may be running low. My advice is to stock up all-purpose or bread flour when the supplies return and store them in the freezer. Notably, whole-wheat flour has a shorter shelf life. So you may consider purchasing wheat berries in bulk instead. Then ground them in a Vitamix blender to make whole-wheat flour.
What is high-extraction wheat flour? It is flour that has an extraction percentage around 85, somewhere between the extraction rate of white flour and whole-wheat flour. Commercially available white (sifted) flour has an extraction rate of 70 to 75%, mostly consisting of the starchy endosperm, with the bran and germ removed. If you don’t have high-extraction flour, this is how you make it. Blend 100% whole-grain flour with white (sifted) flour in a 50/50 ratio. In other words, use 50 grams of whole-grain flour for every 50 grams of all-purpose flour, making 100 grams of high-extraction flour in total.
The recipe comes from Chad Robertson’s Tartine Book No. 3. The ingredients consist of: 50% high-extraction wheat flour, 30% bread flour, 20% whole-wheat flour, 35% flaxseeds, sunflower seeds and wheat germs combined. Similar to other Tartine Breads, the hydration percentage is higher (at 85%) than the typical white breads. Natural leaven is about 15% of total flour weight.
If you don’t have wild yeast in your fridge, 2 teaspoons of yeast may suffice. Make a yeasted pre-ferment by following the recipe here. Then add the remaining yeast at the time of mixing the dough ingredients.
The cheat sheet below outlines the formula and the process in making the sunflower flaxseed sourdough bread. To refresh the breadmaking steps and technique in details, please see this excellent guide published by the New York Times.
This is a very hearty bread with a richly brown caramelized crust that’d complement any meals. You taste the grains and seeds, while no one ingredient dominates or overloads the loaf with competing flavors. The tanginess comes from the lengthy fermentation. Furthermore, you can dial that down and speed up the fermentation time by adding instant yeast. Like all naturally leavened sourdough breads, they have excellent keeping quality. By that I mean this bread can sit on the kitchen counter for one week, it’ll still be serviceable, if it lasts that long.
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