Teff Flour Experiment

[texassourdough]

I have been referring to some an experiment with teff flour in "My Journey to Perfect Hearth Bread" and I felt I should upload some pics so here they are! The teff loaf is the darker loaf on the right. The base dough is about 5% white whole wheat (WWW), 5% rye, and 90% King Arthur AP. (The teff loaf contains about 10% teff flour (the sum of the WWW, rye, and AP)

[banhxeo76]

Re: Teff Flour Experiment

These loaves looks beautiful and I wish I can smell it. Never heard of Teff before and I will certainly try that recipe if I can get my hands on Teff flour. Thanks for sharing your experiment!

Do you it will work if they hydration level was around 75-80% rather than 70% which I believe you did for these loave? Or will it be too slack to make it shapeable? However, you got awesome looking ears on these loaves at 70% and I think it would be more difficult to get that at 80%.

[texassourdough]

Re: Teff Flour Experiment

Hi Dat!

i had heard of teff before going to SFBI but had never tasted it. I liked it and have only occasionally used it - partially because it is somewhat expensive and partially because I am really devoted to my basic bread!

Teff is somewhat like rye but maybe more so. It has low gluten (but no alpha gliadin which is why you will see it called gluten free) so it tends to make a loaf denser and stickier, much like rye. Bob's Red Mill suggests using it to replace 25% of the flour in a bread. That seems too much to me.

I could probably do 75% hydration without too much trouble. Maybe 80?? But I would suggest doing the first loaf/loaves at 70. You will probably want to overdevelop the dough relative to your norm in order to make sure you have a good, strong matrix of gluten to contain the gases from fermentation. I was surprised the oven spring and profiles of the two loaves were so similar. I probably kneaded the teff loaf twice as long as the normal loaf. I think I mentioned this in another reply but it should be repeated here that the loaves held shape reasonably well when dumped from the basket onto the base of the cloche, but puddled badly on slashing - almost a thick pancake. So the profile you see represents a good, strong oven spring!

Thanks for the compliment on the oven spring and ears! That is very much the look I like and want for my bread! And the crumb is pretty much what I want too. While I like airy baguettes, I like my boules to be dense enough that food doesn't fall through!

You should be able to find teff at a Whole Foods or health food store.

Look forward to hearing what you think of it!

Bake On!
Jay