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Rye Flax BreadNote: Sean disagrees with me on nearly everything here. His bread usually turns out better. Use at your own risk. Chris & Meredith, Here's the bread recipe, as promised. I scale up by 10x for 7 loaves, everything roughly linearly (the amounts I've been using recently are in parens - I don't really know how this compares to the original, but it should be fairly close). 200g all-purpose flour (16 cups) 50g whole wheat flour (4 cups) 1 tsp salt (1/2 cup) 100g flax seeds (2-5 cups, depending) 2 tsp brown sugar (1 cup) 150 g H2O (4 1/2 cups) 1 tsp Active Dry Yeast (1/2 cup) In addition, I usually add between 1/2 and 1 cup of vegetable oil. That amount of water & flour makes an incredibly dry dough, so I always freak out and add more water, which turns it very soft, which makes it spread out & not hold its form, which is why all of my bread is flat. The bread I made on Saturday had just over 5 cups in it, for reference. This is the procedure I use. I'm fairly certain the trick is not Hobarting it for too long - I really just put it in for just long enough to make everything stick together. - proof the yeast with warm water - mix dry ingredients (i do this in the hobart mixer bowl) - add oil to the water/yeast, mix, mix into the dry ingredients by hand for a bit. the most important thing here is that there isn't flour/etc on the bottom that won't get mixed in. this is where i freak out & add more water. once it goes in the hobart, adding water gets really painful. - use the hobart to mix it. I really do it for something like 30 seconds, just until everything looks roughly homogeneous. - let rise until doubled. the wetter it is, the faster it rises - my wettest batch took ~ 1 hr, my driest batch took > 2 hours. - put cornmeal on baking sheets, divide up dough & shape into loaves. - let double again (this time usually 45 mins - 1 hr). preheat oven to 450F - slash the tops with a knife - coat the tops with water - I usually just take a cup of water & shake it over so each loaf gets covered roughly equally. - Ideally here we'd use baking stones. Unfortunately, baking stones are expensive and excessive. What I've been doing is filling those deep metal pans we have part way with water & putting the baking sheets on top of that. This makes the bottom of the bread not burn before the top is crisp, & makes some steam. - stick them in the oven - after maybe 20 mins to half an hour, when the bread's risen all it's going to rise and the top is starting to get hard, pull the sheets out & put water on them again. - after another 45 mins or so (in Synergy's ovens, with 4 loaves per oven, so probably less in a small batch), pull them out again, scrape them off the sheet (shouldn't be very hard) & see how the bottoms are doing. I usually bake them until the bottoms are uniformly browned & hard, which usually means turning the pan & loaves around a bit so the less done ones get put in the back, where it's hotter. I tend to check every 5 minutes or so after this point, which is probably a little bit excessive. Anyway, that's what I've been doing. I have no idea how much of that is handwaving & how much of that actually helps, but since it seems to have been working, I'm disinclined to take out any of the steps. In terms of ingredients, I've been eyeballing the amounts for the last two batches, so it's not a finicky recipe that way, which is nice. Best, John |