I bake our bread. It's all whole whole wheat except for 1/4 cup of vital wheat flour to give more structure to the dough so the bread doesn't become so dense. I also use unsulphered blackstrap molasses to give the yeast something to feed on rather than sugar.

I've been thinking about substituting some oat bran and dark rye flour for some of the whole wheat flour. Anyone around here do anything like that in baking their own bread?

Why oat bran? Refined in reverse?

Rye flour may be ok. And the purpose of either of those things was to fix what? Maybe lighter texture?

A couple of reasons. I like the taste of rye and oats.

Both rye and oat bran have a lower glycemic load than wheat flour. The lower the glycemic load the less rapidly blood glucose levels rise. Oat bran is high in protein, fiber, and has a higher fat content than either rye or wheat flour. The combining of all the fiber of the rye and the oats, and adding the fats from the oat bran gives the digestive juices something to work on rather just carbs, further lowering the glycemic load of the bread for a diabetic. Plus both rye and oat bran have a lot of vitamins and minerals and essential fatty acids.

I'm not quite sure how combining the rye and oat bran will affect how much and how long it will take the bread to rise, or how much it will affect baking time, so was curious if anyone had experimented with the combination. I will figure it out it just eliminates trial and error if someone else has already gone through all that.

Sorry, forgot your question about texture. No, it will actually be a more dense bread than whole wheat alone as oat bran is not milled to the same texture as flour. It's quite a bit coarser, and dark rye dough naturally rises less than wheat flour. Partially because it has small chunks of the bran from the rye kernel itself in the flour. That's what lowers its glycemic load vs wheat flour. The bran has a lot of fiber.

It's been my observation that whenever someone takes pieces and parts of whole foods, they run into problems.

So, why not add whole oats and rye?

My purpose in oat bran is its much higher levels of fiber. A cup of oat bran has 50% more fiber than a cup of whole oats: 15 grams vs 10 grams per cup. It is also higher in good fats, B vitamins, amino acids, and several vitamins and minerals than whole oats.

The higher the level of fiber the less a diabetics blood glucose levels spike rather than slowly rise.

All purpose flour, unbleached, has a glycemic load of 62. Whole wheat flour has a glycemic load of 44. Dark Rye has a glycemic load of 33. Oat bran has a glycemic load of 15. I also will use some vital wheat to replace a 1/4-1/3 cup of flour in the bread and it only has a glycemic load of 2. The main purpose though is that its very high levels of protein give the bread dough a lot of structure and make what would be a very heavy dense loaf of bread much lighter and airier.

My purpose is a lot different than a non-diabetic would consider. The percentage of fiber is much more important to me than the average person. Diet is a matter of choices and my choices will be a lot different than yours because of my situation. If my health situation was different I most likely wouldn't even have thought about oat bran, nor done the research into it.

I have been making my bread using oat bran and it has turned out pretty well. It requires the addition of more flour than normal because soaking the oat bran adds quite a bit of water to the dough and to keep the dough from being too wet it requires additional flour. It is very good bread. Nice and moist and with great texture.

I have also played around with adding 9 grain cereal to bread and it is also very good. Some of the best bread I have eaten. Moist, good texture and great flavor.

The drawback with both of these is that the extra moisture in the bread causes it to mildew very quickly if you don't keep it in the refrigerator.