makes 1 loaf
Recently, in the middle of the night, I was thinking back to the farm I lived on in Oregon and about the crops we grew there. In Oregon, you can fill your personal horn of plenty better than anywhere in America. As I lay in bed running through my mental inventory of those fields and orchards, I saw stands of barley, rye, wheat, and oats—all of them grown in rotation to keep the soil healthy. I was lost in a daydream of golden grains in the fields when something about the oats made me pause and reflect.
Oats are a wonderful grain, but you don’t often see them used in bakeries except for Irish soda bread and the so-called multigrain breads. And in the latter case, I think the main reason oats are used is that even though they don’t provide much flavor, they make the bread look convincingly like it’s brimming with healthful whole grains. If an ingredient doesn’t add flavor, though, I don’t see the point of using it. Yet I love oatmeal in the morning, and I started to envision a bread that captures that flavor. By the way, if you don’t come across oat flour in the market, you can just as easily make your own by grinding up cracked oats or steel-cut oats in a spice or coffee grinder.