40% Red Fife Sourdough Batard
Last weekend I discovered a source of organic stoneground red fife flour in Toronto so purchased some after recently reading about it being a local (Canadian) heritage grain. This led me to trying to bake a higher percentage whole grain bread than I have yet. This was my sixth sourdough bake and the first one with the starter I made a little while ago that started with rye that I really haven’t used yet.
I tried my best not to follow the recipe in terms of the times and instead tried my best to read the dough and follow what it told me to do. I think I did alright with that. Fermentation went a fair bit more slowly than the recipe had said. The recipe suggested 3.5 hr bulk but I let my dough bulk for 5 hrs because I wasn’t seeing enough surface bubbles or a bit of convex dough at the edges. I think a few factors led to that including the fact that I had adjusted the recipe to having only 40% red fife rather than 50% whole wheat and my not adding diastatic malt powder. I was mindful of the temperature keeping the bulk around 80ºF. I used the 14% levain that the recipe had but all my sourdough bakes had 20% levain. Anyhow, I believe I let the bulk fermentation go pretty well as I think the crumb appears to show that it was well fermented.
The main problem with the bake was the final shaping. The pre-shaping was fine but for some reason I used my hand and the bench scraper to do the final shaping and I was too rough with it and caused it to tear in a few places. I don’t know what led me to use the bench scraper to do the final shaping as I had never done that before. Also this was only the second batard I have shaped so my inexperience really showed here. The dough came out of the banneton and I could immediately tell that I didn’t have good tension in the dough as it started to ooze out from the areas that had torn and spread.
Fortunately the bread tastes good but it just looks flatter than I would have liked. The poor tension contributed to poor oven spring. One a happy note I have a little bit of an ear on this loaf for the first time. ?
Pre-shape Tiny ear.
I welcome comments and suggestions!
I think that crumb looks just about perfect, especially for being such a high percentage whole grain loaf. What's the hydration? Batards can be a little tricky, I still mess them up sometimes but when you nail them the ears are fantastic, so don't give up!
Thanks, I was pretty happy with the crumb. It was 82% hydration. I will keep trying batards and hopefully I will eventually do OK.
That actually looks great imho!
Thanks for the compliment.