Enough of the White Bread Already

That Lucy is a pistol.  She has been working very hard for weeks on her app to replace every job people do, just like Silicon Valley is doing, thinking they were going to beat her to it and the next thing you know she stopped working on that, thank goodness, and started working on her new even more important app.

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This one will make all food be invisible and have no smell.  She was worried that people get hungry and want to eat more food mainly because it looks and smells good and most of us are already too fat and need to back away from the food bag as it is.

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She says it is for our own good plus the food we can’t see or smell to eat, that we don’t need in the first place, because we already have too much, can be sent to the starving people of the world who need it and never get to see or smell food in the first place so they won’t miss it like we would.

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She thinks it is a huge win win; the fat people of the world will be thinner and the thin people of the world will get fatter and she will get really, really rich somehow and everyone will be happier.   I told her that I would be happier if I could afford to buy better wine because I think I’m going to be drinking a lot more of it as time goes on. 

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I went on to say that I would really appreciate it if she would start working on a wine app where all wine was great and was free.  She got pretty upset with me when I also told her that I thought her first app would have made us thinner anyway because, without jobs, none of us could afford to buy food anyway.

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Chicken Noodle Veggies and Shiitake soup makes a great lunch on bale day

She reminded me that thin starving people would not get fatter with the first jobs app and it wasn’t a win, win for everyone.  I reminded her that thin starving people couldn’t even find the food to eat it if they couldn’t see or smell it.  After that it started getting nasty so I made her start working on this week’s bread recipe instead.

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A mixed fruit and melon breakfast starts of bake day on the right foot

Oddly, there is one of many parallel universes, where everything is exactly the same as this one, you and I are all there, except what we call food is already invisible, has no smell and the people there eat colors instead.  Oddly, the people there are all very fat, you look huge!  there are no thin people at all, but there are no dogs or baking apprentices to be found anywhere either.   Maybe they are eating them too?  We are getting off track here - on to bread and other stuff.

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Your Mom made this for you for lunch if she was like my Mom but this one is a fresh Albacore Tuna, colby jack, Swiss, pepper jack and Parmesan cheese an Poblano pepper, bechamel casserole.

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This one puffed itself up nice in basket and then sprang well too with lots of little blisters

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 It was starting to open at the seams before it went in,

Lucy knew full well that we had plenty of white bread and wanted to do another one after our freaky, friendless fracas of words about her apps just out of spite so I had to set he straight telling her I was working on an app to make all dog food look and taste exactly like bricks – not that the stuff I feed her doesn’t already, so she got the hint and came up with a 50 percenter.

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It is a 6 grain 50% whole grain, bran levain bread using our usual spelt, oat, Kamut, rye, red and white wheat with all of the remaining dough flour being LaFama AP.  All of the bran was in the 100% hydration, 7.5% pre-fermented, single stage levain.  When it had risen 75% we retarded it for 24 hours.

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When we took it out of the fridge we stirred it down and let it warm up on the counter until it had risen 50% as we autolysed the high extraction and LaFama dough flour for 2 hours on the counter with enough water to get the overall mix to 78% with 2% Kosher salt sprinkled on top.  Then we mixed in the levain and did 100 slap and folds to get the gluten started.

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Here it is before it was toasted for bruschetta

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We let it sit for an hour before doing another set of 30 slap and folds.  We then did 2 gentler sets of 10 slap and folds and 4 slap and folds on 30 minute intervals and let it again all on 30 minute intervals.  Then we shaped it as a boule and placed it into an oiled SS bowl, covered it in plastic wrap and into the fridge it went for 12 hours of cold retard

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We took out this morning, gently removed it from the bowl and immediately pre-shaped it and 10 minutes later final shaped it into a boule.   We forgot to lightly dust the basket so we did plopped the dough into it naked, seam side down…… so we could bake it seam side up un-scored and something different for a change.

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Once unmolded onto parchment on a peel and slid into the 500 F combo cooker we spritzed it well, even tough it probably wouldn’t do much for blistering a 50% whole grain bread.  We turned the oven down to 450 F immediately for 20 minutes of steam.  We took the lid off, turned the oven down tp 425 F convection and baked it for 8 more minutes before removing it from the bottom of the combo cooker to let it finish baking on the bottom stone for another 8 minutes. 

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At 208.5 F on the inside we called it done enough.  It bloomed sprang and browned up well enough and the blisters were well muted compared to a white bread but there were way more of them for sure. 

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It smelled great when the lid came off  and we expect the bread to have a decent crumb perfect for bruschetta later tonight! We were right and the toppings were tasty too with the balsamic glaze and Parmesan to top it off.

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Lucy has a salad fettish for sure

This bread came out just liked we had hoped.  Not too open and the perfect platform for bruschetta which was terrific.  This bread is really tasty with 50% whole grains when compared to 20%  and it was even better toasted plus it was still crispy on the outside for a change just a few hours after baking..... it has softened this morning like normal.  The crumb was still soft and moist