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An Initial Attempt to Make Macro Bread

First Published: 21 January 2025

Draft 1

As I’ve mentioned in the last few posts, I’m trying to organize my life under a few different principles. Notably, I wanted to make sure that, even though the USDA seems less than clear about their need, I get enough phytonutrients of each kind. When I looked through my diet and what I could easily add to my diet1, I was missing aliums and purple fruit. With that in mind, I decided to try to make a bread that incorporated them.

At the store, dried figs and daikon2 were the mixins that spoke to me most. Below is the recipe I vaguely followed, along with a quick back of the envelope calculation for macronutrients.

How did they turn out? Honestly pretty well. I’m happy with the taste, if only because the fig comes through, but the daikon doesn’t at all. I didn’t love how sulfurous the daikon smelled while shredding or baking, though, and so might have to take steps to prevent that in the future. Chief among these, I think that I’ll try shredding into cold water that’s been doped10 with either salt or baking soda, since those seem to work for others. Other than that, I might add more of either the daikon or fig, since they’re shockingly under noticed, for being a full 45 percent of the mass of the dough.11

What else went wrong? I don’t love the texture. I’m not sure if that’s due to the relatively low flour to other ratio, the overproofing, or something to do with using whole wheat flour. Regardless, I will probably try the next batch without rye, since I didn’t notice much by way of flavor from it, and it definitely does a lot to add that kind of texture. I’ll also try not to let the dough overproof, but that’s far more optimistic.

Nutrition Information as Eyeballed:

In total:

which, assuming I split my rolls perfectly, comes out to about:

In total, about 24 calories per gram of protein, well below the 40 threshold I need to average over the day. It is interesting how calorically empty daikon is, and how relatively dense fig is.

Daily reflection:

Didn’t do great about maintaining the schedule I set, but did do more than expected, all things considered.


  1. such as carrots, which I love to gnaw on

  2. which I normally see labeled as daikon radish but

  3. 529

  4. 648

  5. about three hours, in my case

  6. 267

  7. 254

  8. 103

  9. total of 840 grams or so

  10. oop my materials chemist came out

  11. ok not entirely, because I did squeeze about half the mass of the daikon out as water. Still, that’s like 400 grams, so still one part in three.

  12. that’s what my notes said, so I’m willing to believe I missed ten grams of flour somewhere. Oh I think it might have just been spillover

  13. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that it’s almost all one of the macros by mass

  14. it is at this point that I opened a spreadsheet to do the math

  15. 5136.696

  16. 209.429

  17. 84.8475

  18. 900.66

  19. 144.44