Brownman’s Everyday Sprouted Sourdough

You can always tell what the current everyday bread is around here when the freezer is getting close to being empty. – like it is right now.  We didn’t make a bread last Friday and we have been giving away some of it the past two weeks too.

So we were down to a couple quarters of 2 different rye breads and needed an everyday sandwich loaf.  What Lucy came up with was a 50% whole grain bread where half the whole grains were sprouted 9 grains at 75% hydration which is pretty low for us for this kind of bread where we would normally be at 78% or so.

Nothing fancy going on here.   The sprouted 9 grains were: buckwheat, oat, barley, barley, spelt rye, red and white wheat and farro - which was emmer in this case as was the 25% no- sprouted whole grains.  The rest of the flour was bread flour from the bins at Winco and the liquid was all water.

The levain was twice as big as normal at 20% pre-fermented flour, a two stage one where the first stage was the bran from the non-sprouted whole grain and the 2nd stage was the high extraction flour that was left from the sifting of it.  No sprouted or bread flour was in the levain.

We used 10 g of NMNF starter that was only 2 weeks retarded.  The first stage was 3 hours and 2nd stage was 6 hours when it easily more than doubled.  We did autolyze the high extraction 2nd stage flour for the entire length of the first sage build - 3 hours.  We used the large levain because our kitchen is now 12 F lower than the summer and we planned for a 12 hour retard instead of the normal 18-21 hour one.

Since most of the whole grains in the dough flour were sprouted, there really wasn’t much of a reason to autolyse the dough flour for a long time so we went for 40 minutes with the salt sprinkled on top.  Once the large levain hit the mix we did 80 slap and folds for the first set and then 10 for the 2nd and 3rd set – all on 20 minute intervals.  We then did 2 sets of 4 stretch and folds from the compass points on 30 minute intervals.

When the gluten development period of 2 hours was done we let the dough sit for 20 minutes of bulk ferment before pre-shaping and then final shaping into a boule 10 minutes later.  We immediately dropped it into a rice floured basket seam side up, bagged it in a new trash can liner, something unusual for us, and out it in the fridge for the 12 hour retard.

We love home made biscuits - especially with sausage gravy on them

We wanted to make sure that we still knew how to make a loaf bread, without over proofing it in the fridge, after the last bake for the girls at the dental office 2 weeks ago.  It is just a matter of making sure it is at 85% proof for a loaf of bread like this one and we managed to get about that at the 12 hour mark.

Have a salad when ever you can!

We fired up the oven to 550 F with the combo cooker between the 2 stones.  Once it hit temperature, we took the basket of dough out of the fridge, quickly slashed it tic-tack-toe style, unmolded it onto parchment on a peel and then loaded it into the DO with no warm up on the counter.

When the DO hit the heat, we turned the oven down to 50 F for 2 minutes and then down to 450 F for 16 more minutes of steam.  Once the lid came off, we saw that it had bloomed and sprang nicely.  We then took the oven down to 425 F convection for 8 minutes.

We then removed it from the bottom of the DO and finishing it on the bottom stone, baking for another 13 minutes spinning it once.  It browned up well and was at 209.5 F when we took it out of the oven to cool on the rack.  There were a few blisters here and there but nothing to write home about.  Still it looked pretty much like it should if a doofus wasn’t doing the baking.

OK, have some ribs with that salad.  This picture was before the last half hour of glaze.   We also smoked some chicken and salmon for this feast but no pictures of these

The crumb came put fairly open, soft, moist and glossy,.  There was some extra tang with this one due to the large bran levain.  It is a delicious bread all the way around and the crust went soft as it cooled to make for one fine sandwich bread.  Monsoon is over but we haven't posted an AZ sunset for a while so here was last night's talking to ET.

Formula

25% Sprouted 9 Grain.

25% Non Sprouted 9 Grain

50% Winco Bread Flouer

75% Water

2% salt

20% pre-fermented levain was 2 stage at 100% hydration using all the non-sprouted 9 grain bran and most of the high extraction,  non sprouted 9 grain flour.