This is a 50/50 White/Wheat loaf featuring a mix of seeds. It works best toasted or as a sandwich bread. This bread is inspired by a bread of the same name served at Broadway Daily Bread in San Antonio, Texas.
Ingredient Requirements
Uses baker’s percentage. For a typical loaf pan, 4x the percentanges should be a suitable amount.
- 32% white bread flour
- 32% wheat flour
- 24% seeds1
- 8% sunflower seeds
- 6% flax seeds
- 7% millet
- 3% poppy seeds
- 86% water
- 0.5% yeast
- 2% salt
- Dough conditioner2
Quick Reference
Provided for repeat cooks who don’t need the explanations.
Preferment
- 20% wheat flour
- Pinch of yeast
- 12% water
Soaker (Seeds)
- 24% seeds
- 0.5% salt
- 30% boiling water
Yudane
- 18% wheat flour
- 24% boiling water
Knead Mix
- 8% water
- 1.5% salt
- 0.5% yeast
- Preferment
- Yudane
- 38% white flour
Final Mix
- Knead mix
- Soaker / Seeds
Cooking
- 410F for 25 minutes
- Remove from pan
- 410F for 7 minutes
Preparation
Make the preferment and seed mixtures the night before you want to cook this bread.
Preferment
- 20% wheat flour
- Pinch of yeast
- 12% water
The preferment will sit out overight, so it will need some type of covering. Plastic wrap is acceptable. I’ll often use jars, but they can be a pain to get the preferment out of. Pick whatever works for you.
Mix yeast into flour and then add water. Allow to sit in a relatively warm place overight. For example, overnight in your kitchen may be too cold. Preferment is a complicated topic that deserves more research. There are some resources listed at the bottom if you want to learn more.
Soaker (Seeds)
- 24% seeds
- 0.5% salt
- 30% boiling water
Place all of the seeds into a heat-safe, sealable container. Once again, plastic wrap is acceptable. Add the salt on top of the seeds, and then pour boiling water over the seeds. Seal and allow to sit overnight.
Yudane
- 18% wheat flour
- 24% boiling water
The next day, before you begin making the dough, add heat more water than you need in the microwave and add the heated water to the wheat flour. Cover and allow to cool to room temperature so it doesn’t harm anything in the final mix, at least less than 105 F.
The yudane is a Japanese breadmaking trick in which you over-hydrate some flour with boiling water. Flour’s ability to retain water is dependent on its temperature. So by adding boiling water to some of your flour, so you can make the flour retain more water than it normally would. This has the advantage of both making your bread more soft and fluffly, but also delaying stale-ing of the bread.
Knead Mix
- 8% water
- 1.5% salt
- 0.5% yeast
- Preferment
- Yudane
- 38% white flour
Add all of these ingredients together and start kneading. This affair will be fairly dry because some more water will come along with the seeds, but the seeds will also inhibit gluten formation. So we want to get some gluten formed before adding them. Once you feel like everything is combined and evenly distributed, move on to the final mix.
Final Mix
- Knead mix
- Soaker / Seeds
Add in the seeds and knead until dough forms a cohesive ball. In a mixer, it will basically form a solid lump and not leave any mess on the side of the mixing bowl. Similarly, it shouldn’t be leaving a mess on your counter if you are mixing by hand.
Bulk Fermentation / 1st Proof
Cover and allow loaf to rise to doubled in size. Err on the low side here. Instant yeast can be tempermental, but it’s not a disaster if you don’t get to it. I’ve had a dough quadruple in size in this phase and it’s still come out fine thanks to some careful later steps. This step can take anywhere from 45 minutes to 1.5 hours, usually. But depends heavily on the temperature of your dough and your kitchen.
Shaping
Make sure to place some parchment paper into the vessel you plan on cooking in. That will make it much easier to remove later.
Flour the top of the dough and your work surface. Give your dough a good press to collapse all of the air bubbles. It doesn’t have to be aggressive. We just want to redistribute the yeast and prevent any abnormally big bubbles from forming and making voids in the final product. Dump the loaf out onto your work surface.
Split the dough into three equal weight pieces. Flatten them out into a rectangle with the short side about as wide as the short side of your loaf tin. Starting from a short end, roll the dough up into a big roll and place into the loaf pan to create three adjacent rolls. Lightly press down the three rolls into the pan, so it fills in the space. This will encourage the dough to rise to fill the container before moving upward, giving it a more consistent shape.
Cover your dough for the final proof.
Final Proofing
Allow your dough to double in size. This is really 100% by feel and will take experiementation to get a feel for. Let it go for what you feel is too long once and see what happens. But when you feel that your dough is getting close, preheat your oven and remove any racks that would prevent you from cooking in the middle of the oven.
A good tell for if your dough is prooved enough is by how readily is springs back when you lighly push your finger into it. If it springs back readily, its not prooved enough. If it takes a bit to come back, it’s about right. If it doesn’t come back, or comes back extremely slowly, it’s over-prooved.
Cooking
Preheat oven to >425F or higher. We will lower the temperature after the loaf goes in. But we elevate the temperature to make up for lost temperature when opening the door.
Uncover your loaf and spray with water. You want to get it coated well in water, but avoid pooling. This both helps prevent a crust from forming too fast, and adds much needed humidity to your oven. If a crust forms on your dough too early, the gas won’t be able to get out anymore. We can help prevent early crust formation by spraying the dough.
Quickly shove that bad boy in the oven and set the oven to 410F. After 25 minutes, remove from oven and remove the dough from the tin, as well as removing the parchment paper from the loaf. Place the loaf back in the oven, directly on the racks, on its side for 7 additional minutes to set the crust.
When the time is up, remove the loaf from the oven and allow to cool on a wire rack.
Resources
- Chain Baker - Improving The Basic White Bread By Using a Preferment - Basics of using a preferment in a dough.
- Chain Baker - Poolish, Biga, Sponge, Pâte Fermentée, Preferments Explained - Different types of preferment to meet your needs.
- Chain Baker - Soakers Explained, How to use a Soaker in Breadmaking - How to use seeds in a bread recipe.
- Chain Baker - Beautiful 100% Whole Wheat Sandwich Loaf Recipe | Yudane Method - Original recipe idea, though the current has diverged significantly.
- Chain Baker - Tangzhong & Yudane Explained, Bread Improvers - Yudane implementation details and ideas.
- Broadway Daily Bread - Original source of Birdman, and inspiration for the existence of this recipe.