Big Levain Multigrain Sourdough with Figs, Seeds, Potato & Poolish

For some reason my apprentice and I had a hard time keeping the mobile Sinclair Bakery’s Potato rolls, that we were making at the same time,  out of the this week’s SD bread.

The original idea was to take the extra multigrain levain that we had built a week ago Wednesday and refrigerated for a week and add to it with another feeding to get it back up to bread rising speed for this week’s bake that we hoped would be very sour and we were going to call Big Levain Multigrain Sourdough.   

We before you know it, I had tossed the poolish and the potatoes made for the potato rolls into the dry mix for the SD bread.  Once in there and mixing for a minute it is pretty hard to get the mistake out of the mix.

Needless to say, Lucy was nearly beside herself and sticking to her ‘we don’t need no stinking commercial yeast in our sourdough bread’ stance but, it was a little too late for that.  Since we love potatoes in SD bread, we just went along with the recipe that Lucy had concocted as if nothing had happened.

The problem was that we needed rolls for once a month dinner hamburgers and they would now be 6 hours late because the poolish was gone meaning we needed another dinner plan quickly.

Everything cooking and baking was now backwards which, around here, is our strong suit and nothing out of the ordinary.  In any event we got another poolish going for the rolls and thankfully we had enough potato and potato water left over.

The SD bread was now 6 hours early meaning our planned 12 hour retard of the shaped dough would now be 18 hours long and that was really pushing a big levain SD that also had a 6 hour old ADY poolish making over proofing a near certainty!  For sure our really sour experiment with the big 4 build week old levain was shot to smithereens.

We also needed to get this bread dough in the fridge because it was going to freeze last night and we still had to haul the entire pot garden inside for protection for this unusual cod snap that is easily 4-6 weeks early.

So we started right away on our unusually short 20 minute autolyse using fig re-hydration and potato water for the liquid holding back only the salt, which we sprinkled on top, the figs, pumpkin and sunflower seeds.

Next came the usual 3 sets of slap and folds on 8, 3.and 1 minute intervals.  Even though the recipe doesn’t appear to be wet, this felt like a 80% hydration dough because the potatoes are around 75% water and this water isn’t accounted for in the recipe.  It took the full 3 sets of slap and folds to get the dough to quit sticking to the counter.

Then 2 sets of S&F’s where done from the compass points where the held back figs and nuts were added on the first one.  Usually we would do 3 sets but since were messed up with too much levain and commercial yeast we held it back toi 2 sets where the 2nd set acted as the pre- shape.

At the last minute we decided to make a Chacon shape for the last day of Hanukkah.  We haven made a Chacon for a while but quickly decided to make (2) Franz Joseph roll shapes places at the ends of the oval baskets with some balls and short logs surrounding them.

Then the remaining dough was shaped into and oval flat disk and placed over the design in the bottom of the basket.  The basket was immediately placed in a trash can liner and put into the fridge with no counter proofing to try to compensate for too much SD levain and yeast for an 18 hour retard.

After 18 hours in the fridge the dough was fully risen so we decided to bake it cold right out of the fridge which was the right decision.  Big Old Betsy was pre- heated to 550 F and steaming lava rocks were inserted at a\that temperature.   When the steam was billow1ng the bread was un-molded and loaded onto the bottom stone

After 2 minutes the temperature was turned down to 500 F and then 2 minutes later it was turned down to 475 F when it stayed until the 15 minute mark when the steam was removed and the temperature was turned down to 425 F.  25 minutes later, the bread hit 203 F on the inside when the oven was turned off and when the bread hit 205 F irt was removed to the cooling rack..

The dough bloomed well where expected and cracked according to the design.  It didn’t spring much but did spread a little pointing out that the dough was 100% proofed.  The bread browned very well and the exterior came out very handsome as a result.  

Yes it is turkey Italian sausage pasta!

The crust stayed somewhat crunchy which we liked very much and it was especially tasty.   The crumb was not as open as we thought it would be, nor was it as sour as our normal SD breads.  Still, the taste was great, nutty seedy and figgy.  Just delicious even though I didn’t get to eat the sandwich I made for lunch with it.

My wife came home for lunch unexpectedly and commandeered that sandwich for her lunch….. with a smile on her face!   So I had a P&J with it instead and a toasted  piece to try with butter just to make sure it was as good as it looked   You can’t help but like this bread.

Yes it is turkey white, red bean & stuffing,  green chli...... chili.  The turkey is now all gone but the stuffing remains!

Formula

 When it is cold outside, Lucy likes to snuggle between two pillows.