Altamura Style Whole Sprouted 6 Grain Sourdough with Bran Levain

Seems many things come in spurts on the TFL.  We are always looking for something new and interesting to do on the bread front.  Recently, we have seen a few Pain di Altamura breads with the odd folding of the dough a few minutes before baking.  The most interesting thing is this folding.  The bread itself is a straightforward durum wheat one but the look of the weird lump of bread you end up with is its calling card.

For the life of me, I have no idea why they would want to deflate their dough and moosh it into a shape, resembling a scientific oddity, that ends up densely pinched in the middle and good for nothing I can think of right away.   But there are all kinds of things in the bread world that I can’t understand or explain and these are the things that make bread making addicting for me.

The non-Kamut berries sprouted faster.

Traditional Altamura bread is usually 100% durum wheat bread, at 60% hydration made with sourdough in about 5 hours from mix to bake.  The biggest complaint of late is that it doesn’t really taste that great. It has a nutty flavor, the bread has a beautiful yellow color for the crumb and crust which is pretty cool for an un-enriched bread.  But if a bread doesn’t taste as good as it looks we are naturally let down a bit.

Easy to tell which side is the semolina porridge.

So Lucy tasked herself this week to get some flavor into this bread, increase its nutrition, improve its GI and still try to keep its dinosaur dump looks.  First foo she tossed the 5 hour process and went to a very long one instead.  Long means flavor when it comes to SD so that was good place for her to start.

The really dark, if tiny, bran levain is also easy to spot.

The 2nd thing she did was to get some other whole grains in the mix to present a more complex and deep flavor profile.  She used small amounts of rye, wheat, spelt and barley.  If the mix stayed all durum, that is what you will get a greatly refined durum bread that doesn’t taste that great.  For a 3rd change she replaced much of the durum with its close cousin Kamut.  Kamut is a 28 chromosome grain like durum and an ancient one too - a natural hybrid of durum and polonicum finally confirmed by DNA testing for the science starved like me.

 The bread really fermented well in the fridge.

Kamut also has that wonderful yellow coloring like durum.  The problem with durum semolina is that most of the flavor found in the bran and germ has been stripped away by the milling and sifting proves.  So using whole grain Kamut and milling it at home we could keep all of the lost flavor and remove the blandness that plain pasta is known to have.

This beautifully risen loaf should have been slashed and baked rtter than folded over to bring out its full potential..

Since the whole grains would end up at 72% for this bread instead of 0% for the traditional Altamura we upped the hydration to 75% and used all the sifted out bran from the whole grains in the levain to keep it wettest the longest and attacked by the acid in the mix for as long as possible.

The longer it sat waiting for the oven to heat up the more the bottom half was deflated.

Might as well shoot for as open a crumb as we can muster especially knowing that much of the openness would be wiped away with the folding at the last minute.  The barn also will make the levain and resulting bread more sour as well and this bread need every helping hand in the flavor department.

The other edge.

The levain was built over 3 stages and then retarded for 36 hours to bring out the sour as well as soften the bran from the whole grains.  We also learned not long ago that the kids in the UK are fed semolina porridge for breakfast.  You learn something new every day and it had been years since we had made a decent gruel for bread.  So we made a semolina one for this bread to try make Ian happy..

All of the durum semolina in this bread was re-milled to make it into more of a flour than sandpaper grit.  The levain ended up being less than 10% pre-fermented flour.  Less levain means more time and more time means more flavor generally speaking.   We did our usual 3 sets of 30 slap and folds and 3 sets of 4 stretch and folds, all on 15 minute intervals since durum and Kamut don’t like much man handling and are fast to ferment.

There is that same old same old salad again!  Still yummy though....

We skipped the bulk ferment because of the speed of these grains and did a 21 hour shaped retard in an oval basket.  We took the bread out of the fridge and cold shaped it by folding it over gently in half and then fired up the oven to 500 F preheat with one pan of Mega Steam in place of our normal two pans of lave rocks.

Yep, the bottom got smooshed.  Very dense down there.

Normally this bread would be baked in a WFO without steam but the oven itself is packed with bread that is putting out a lot of steam all by itself so we thought one pan of steam was a good compromise.  The folding of the bread mooshed the bottom half and it wasn’t likely to, nor did it, recover with spring in the oven.  If I was making this bread agai, I wouldn’t fold it but just slash it twice and bake it off.   No sense ruining half the bread in my book.

Looks better if you cover up the dense part:_)

We baked it with steam for 18 minutes at 450 F and then 38 minutes at 425 F convection until it read 207 F in the middle.  We then moved it to the cooling rack.  It was amazing how much like a real WFO loaf of Atamura this bread actually looked.  Dark, no gloss crust with that beautiful yellow tinge underneath that you could see well where the bread sprang at the open folded overlap section.

 I don’t have much hope of the crumb on the bottom section but hopefully the top half will be OK.  We shall see once it cools.  We are pretty sure the flavor problem of this bread will be cured just from the aroma it is putting off on the cooling rack!  This bread is as tasty as any other whole grain sprouted bread that we have have made lately with the added bit of a slight sweet nutty finish.  Just don't fold it over like this doofus did. The crumb din't come out as yellow as we hoped - too many whole grains:-)  It made a great grilled chicken pepperjack cheese, avocado, lettuces and tomato sandwich for lunch with the usual fixings.\