Sunroot flour in sourdough bread

I figured you fine folks may appreciate my recent experiment with sunroot (aka jerusalem artichoke) flour. I'm always looking for ways to supplement the flour that we purchase, and while large scale grain production is part of the plan, I only just harvested my first flour corn and planted my first wheat and barley.

My early experiments were with acorn flour (works great) and ground nettle leaf (not so great). I generally try to replace anywhere between 10-25% of my wheat flour in my sourdough recipe (I follow Claire Saffitz' recipe, it's easily google-able).

This year I harvested probably 10lbs of sunroot, cut them in half and dehydrated them. I learned it's important for them to be very, very dry, as when I ran them through my blender afterwards the slightest bit of moisture gummed it up. With some troubleshooting I ended up with a decent amount of fine flour.

I used 100g of this flour in my recipe, so about 10%. I also used 150g rye, 750g white wheat flour, and my hydration was 75% (750g water). I had to add more water as the sunroot flour seemed to absorb a lot during the autolyse. The rise was good although obviously not as good as if it had been all gluten. It looked attractive (I added a sprinkle of nettle seed on top) and cut nicely.

The sunroot flour did effect the crumb and gave the bread an overall slightly gummy/undercooked/dense texture, which honestly I don't mind. Flavour-wise the sunroot comes through, but not so much that it would be unpleasant to have with jam or other sweet spreads. I would call it a successful loaf but experiment with adding a bit less (maybe 50-75g).

My main motivations were to use up an abundant crop, increase the diversity of our diet, aid gut health (I've seen inulin powder recommended for this a lot, well, it's not hard to grow and make your own!), and reduce our reliance on purchased flours. I'm not sure if the last one will be a success. But I can see myself adding a small amount to plenty of baked goods that would suit the application, such as quickbreads, pancakes and muffins.

Edited to add: I think there may be potential to exploit the flour's natural gumminess and use it to bind loose doughs or thicken gravies and stews!