Experimenting with different flours
Hi - I've been making Ken Forkishs Overnight Country Blonde bread for some time now with great success. The formula calls for around 6% rye flour and 3% whole wheat. Lately I've been experimenting with switching these out for other types of flours. My last bake I replaced the rye with spelt flour and the result was great. I just picked up some Amaranth flour and was going to try that next. Anyone have any experience or thoughts about this?
Also I bought some ground hemp hearts and wanted to try using that as well. Should I treat that like a flour and basically just keep the % the same and swap out the flour? Or would this be something I should treat more like a "mix in" to be added in addition to whatever flours I use.
Also wondering for any of these flours, if I bump up the % and reduce the amount of white flour, is there a turning point where the texture of the bread would start to change and require me to change the balance or hydration? With these small percentages these tweaks just seem to add subtle flavor differences but not impact the texture of the bread too much. Thanks!
From what I understand, you can't grind hemp into flour because of the high fat content. Those would be better incorporated as a mix in after soaking. However, I've never used them so I can't speak to any personal experience.
Amaranth is essentially gluten free so you won't be able to do a direct swap-out of bread flour for any appreciable percentage without trading off some structure in the final loaf.
When trying new flours I typically don't use more than 20-25% of the total flour until I get a feel for how they work or taste. But, that is with 'normal' gluten flours. It gets trickier when you start trying to incorporate low-gluten products. You might try utilizing the search function here at TFL or Google to find some guidance for the two grains/seed you mentioned. It does sound like the recipe you mentioned uses a pretty low percentage of flours that aren't bread flour. You could probably get away with some experimentation if you are only talking about 9% of the total flour weight. Happy Baking!
Also...nice bake in the photo!
Very good looking loaf!
I use hemp seeds the same way as sesame or flax, and I really like them
You can compensate for low gluten flours by scalding them (to gelatinize their starches) then incorporating the scald. Scalding gives more leeway on hydration. Do note that it could speed fermentation due to making sugars more available in the scalded grain.