Olive Boule

It's been a while since my last post. The day job has been keeping me quite busy and I haven't had the bandwidth to bake bread as much as I would like. I'm baking every third weekend to keep the bread box full and the freezer stocked. My go-to bread has been Ken Forkish's overnight country blonde (just like I posted here: http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/41150/overnight-country-blonde-fwsy). It's mostly hands off and seems to work well especially with the mild San Francisco temperatures we've been experiencing lately.

I decided to shake things up and bake something else. This weekend's bake was an olive boule made with 50% liquid levain and 60% water in the final dough. That gave me an overall hydration of 68%. Hydration-wise, 68% is pretty much as low as I go for a lean dough.

The resulting crumb was not too open which was a good way to keep in those delicious olives. The complex tangy taste of my bread was due to the age of my starter. I keep my stiff maintenance starter in the refrigerator unfed and then feed/build it using dabrownman's no fuss method whenever I want to bake.

Olive Bread

• 80% AP flour
• 20% whole rye flour
• 60% water
• 2.4 % salt
• 50% levain (100% hydration, 20% rye)
• 30% pitted Kalamata olives

1. Mixed all ingredients by hand.
2. Bulk fermented for 3 hours at room temperature (about 70F) with 4 sets of stretches and folds during the first 2 hours and untouched during the third hour.
3. Preshaped and bench rested for 30 minutes.
4. Shape retarded in the refrigerator (40F) for 12 hours.
5. Baked at 450F for 35 minutes (for 600 grams dough).

:) Mary