Oat and flax soaker bread with quinoa paste

Sourlotti by Abby has a great way for making an 'oat porridge' bread that has worked out well for me before. I think it might be the amount of butter in the soaker preparation that makes it work so much better for me? In any case, for this loaf I decided to eschew the butter and replace it with coconut oil which has been working very nicely for me as a substitute for butter in other recipes too like hamburger rolls.

Danni3ll3 made a bread with sprouted quinoa which was on my mind lately, and while I was prepping this bread I decided to use the white quinoa that I'd started soaking the night before for sprouting in this bread as well, even though it was intended originally for something else. The quinoa seeds didn't get much of an opportunity to sprout, and the stiff quinoa paste that I made out of them seemed flavourless, with only the merest sweet taste. This is what the quinoa paste looked like (basically soaked white quinoa seeds that had been moistened as if to sprout them, but only for 16 hours, and then ground in the food processor. Quite a stiff consistency. I added it together with the levain to the mix with the autolysed dough:

It was a bit bold to use that in this bread, in addition to the oat and flax soaker for which quite a lot is added - about 200g of that soaker was added by lamination to each loaf! But, miraculously it seemed to work out and the dough managed to hold all the extras in it.

Its hard to judge the hydration with these things - nominally a 93% hydration but a lot of that water is locked into the oats/flax in the soaker. And these loaves needed a long bake - 60 mins in total, because of the oat soaker. I squashed the one loaf a little trying to turn it 20 minutes in (when removing the steam trays). It was still very wet, even at that time and shouldn't have been touched.

The bread was nice to eat, and I did find myself choosing it over some of my other frozen loaves for quite a few days after. I would say though that it was fairly mild to the taste - the quinoa and oats didn't bring in as much flavour when compared to a bread like the 5 grain levain which I was mentally comparing it to. I do like the quinoa paste though and will probably try it again - it seemed to bake up nicely, and maybe next time I won't be so impatient and even give the quinoa a chance to sprout.