Leftover Bread

My wife found some high extraction sprouted rye and high extraction sprouted red and white wheat hanging around somewhere.  I knew it was sprouted because it said it was on the label on  the lids. I’m guessing it was ground up about month ago…… so you could say it was properly aged, the term millers use to make people think they are getting their flour at the peak of freshness when it really just hiding their 30 day supply chain timeline to get it to you.

I can’t remember the last time we used home ground flour that was a month old.  I knew it was high extraction flour because, when we put it though the sieve, nothing was captured in it.  I suppose we used the bran to feed the NMNF starters, one rye and one wheat, when we refreshed them about a month ago.

At any rate, I knew Lucy wasn’t going to come up white a bread that had no whole grains in it and sure enough she specified 12% whole red and white wheat to be used in the 3 stage, 100% hydration levain build that had 6 g each of rye and wheat NMNF starter.  The first stage feeding was the bran sifted from the whole grains and the other two stages used up the rest of the freshly milled high extraction wheat.

There was no time to retard the built levain since we started it early Thursday morning instead of Wednesday as usual, and we used it at the 8 hour mark, two hours after the 3rd feeding when it had doubled in volume.  It is cold here, 64 F in the kitchen, but the levain was built on the heating pad at 80 F so it was very fast to get itself going.

We used the 23% sprouted high extraction rye and wheat flour (half each) along with the 75% Albertson’s bread flour for the 40 minute autolyze - with enough water to bring the overall hydration up to 78%, including the levain water and the 2% pink Himalayan sea salt sprinkled on top.

Once the autolyse was done, the salt and levain stirred in we did 50 slap and folds to get the levain and slat well distributed.  After a 30 minute rest, we then did 5 sets of (4) stretch and folds-  all on 30 minute intervals.  We came up with a new way to keep the dough at 78 F over the 3 hours of gluten development.

Homemade sausage noodle turkey soup is tough to beat - and you can't buy it anywhere else!

We put the dough on an oiled very thin plastic mat that was the perfect size when placed on the heating pad.  We then covered the dough with the stainless mixing bowl and a towel to keep it warm between the stretch and fold sets – worked great!  The dough puffed itself up about 30% over these 3 hours as a result and was ready to hit the rice floured oval basket at the 3 1/4 hour mark after being pre-shaped and final shaped into a squat oval.

Wouldn't it be great if you could grow your own tuna?

The basket was placed in a trash can liner for a 12 hour cold retard in the fridge.  Once it came out of the fridge it wasn’t fully proofed so we put it on the counter for a 3 hour warm up and final proof.  We unmolded onto parchment on and peel, slashed it lengthwise and placed it into the 500 F combo cooker and then inti the oven between the two stones.

There's that salad - this one has everything in it!

We turned the oven down to 450 F for 18 minutes of steam under the lid and then turned the oven down to 425 F convection for another 12 minutes of baking.  5 minutes into the dry heat baking we removed the bread from the bottom of the cooker so the bread could finish baking on the bottom stone without burning the bottom.

The bread sprang pretty well under steam with some blisters and browned well without it.  We took it out of the oven when it hit 207 F on the inside.  We will have to wait on the crumb shot.  The crumb turned put fairly open, soft, moist and glossy too.  The crust went soft as it cooled and the bread reminded me of what SFSD could really be if it tried harder:-)  This is a seriously, as opposed to non seriously,  great taasting white bread.  Just lovely.....the grains and the sour come through as a balancing act where one side is just perfect for the other.  I would talk about the possibolities as a sandwich bread but I ahvenlt has one yet.

Formula

12% Whole red and white wheat 3 stage levain - 100% hydration – (2) 3 hour stages and 2 hour 3rd stage.

23% High extraction rye and wheat

75% Albertson’s bread flour

78% overall hydration

2% Pink Himalayan sea salt.