I have a list of ingredients for some purchased delicious 8 Grain rolls I really like - how do I create a recipe out of the list?

The list reads: ww flour, H20, dark raisins, rye flour, wheat gluten, rolled oats, palm oil, light molasses. 8 grain base (cracked wheat, barley flakes, steel cut oats, polenta, rye meal, rye flakes, millet, rice bran, sunflower seeds, wheat germ, wheat flakes), rye meal, starter ferment, liquid malt, wheat bran, salt, yeast.

JulieL-G
  • Posted by: JulieL-G
  • September 14, 2016
  • 2022 views
  • 4 Comments

4 Comments

JulieL-G September 15, 2016
Thanks so much for both your answers - they are very helpful. I have made a great deal of bread - so I think I understand the basics well - but getting the ratio of ingredients "right" still intimidates me. I have tried several other similarly-named recipes with these ingredients and the results are far more dense then these rolls. I was not aware of Ostmann's book and I think that will be my first stop. Again, many thanks.
 
ChefJune September 15, 2016
Julie, I understand your trepidation. When I was a little girl, the very aunt who started me baking bread in the first place tasked me to make bread without a recipe. I added flour by feel. This was very life-affirming for me, because it definitely taught me that the amount of flour specified in a written recipe is never written in stone. The weather, humidity in the air, can add to the amount of moisture in the recipe and affect the amount of flour needed either up or down.
 
ChefJune September 15, 2016
How many times have you ever made any breads? Are those techniques things you are familiar with? If not, I would suggest you first start by making a simple white bread from a known reliable recipe [maybe from a bood like Rose Levy Beranbaum's "The Bread Bible," or Peter Rinehart's "The bread Bakers' Apprentice."

If you are already a bread baker, then I would suggest you take a look at some existing recipes for similar type rolls and try to match your recipes up with those in the printed recipe. Barbara Gibbs Ostmann has written a wonderful book called "The Recipe Writers' Handbook," that I always recommend to anyone who wants to be GOOD at recipe writing.
 
creamtea September 14, 2016
It would be extremely difficult to go from a lengthy list of ingredients with no measurements, to make a cohesive yeast dough that works. Instead, find an 8-grain bread recipe you like. Over time you can experiment, adding a little more of this or that, adding sweetness with honey or molasses, adding texture with sunflower seeds and grains. You probably don't need the exact list shown here. The baker or manufacturer of your rolls tested his or her recipe over time. It would be madly impossible (and expensive) to ever get the right ratios from this large list of individual ingredients.
The only bread I bake is challah, with a more limited list of ingredient; I changed the recipe over time. Perhaps the experienced bread bakers here can chime in with more advice.
 
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