An Easy Bake For St. Paddy’s Day - 5 Sprouted Grain Sourdough

With a corned beef; making, soaking and smoking going on for the big day, we don’t have a lot of time to mess around with this week’s sprouted sourdough.  Lucy wanted to do Ballymaloe’s SD brown bread  which would have been perfect and we really like it, but that takes more time than I wanted to spend rounding up all the stuff that goes into it.  Plus, what we need in the freezer is a white bread.

So, we whipped up a 20% sprouted 5 grain SD at 78% hydration using a 10% pre-fermented bran and high extraction sprouted, 2 stage, 100% hydration, levain where the sprouted bran was the first stage.  The 5 sprouted grains were red and white wheat, Kamut, spelt and rye.

We didn’t have time to retard the levain once I was built and it went straight into the 1 hour autolyzed dough flour made up of equal parts of LaFama AP and Albertson’s bread flour that had the 2% pink Himalayan sea salt sprinkled on top.

We immediately did 50 slap and folds to get everything mixed together and then did 2 more sets of 6 slap and folds and 3 more sets of 4 stretch and folds al over 30 minute intervals.  We just left the dough in the counter and covered with a stainless-steel mixing bowl between sets.

After a pre-shape and final shape, we dropped the dough into a rice floured basket for a 12 hour overnight retard in the fridge.  We took the dough out of the fridge and fired up the oven to 500 F with the combo cooker inside.  When the oven was ready we unmolded the dough onto parchment, on a peel, slashed it tic tack toe style, dropped it in the CC and then put into the oven between the two stones.

We baked it at 450 F for 18 minutes under steam and then removed the lid and continued to bake for another 6 minutes at 425 F convection before removing the bread entirely from the CC and placing it on the bottom stone to finish baking – about another 6 minutes until it hit 208 F in the inside.

It had risen bloomed and browned well in the oven but we will have to wait in the crumb shot when we make some kind of  sandwich for lunch.  Well no sandwich for lunch but we did have some Irish stew that needed sopping up and this bread was perfect.for doing so.

The crumb was so soft we almost couldn't cut it at all.  We really had to squish it down to get the bread knife to take hold.  The crust was still crispy and had not gone soft yet so it was still warm in the middle.  This bread is delicious and the perfect SFSD white bread to sop up some fish stew made famous there.  You an't go wrong with this recipe.

Formula

Levain

10% pre-fermented sprouted bran and high extraction, 2 stage, 100% hydration levain

Dough

10% High extraction sprouted 5 grain

40% Lafama AP

40% Albertson’s bread flour

78% overall hydration

2% pink Himalayan sea salt