Leaving the pan...
So I mostly bake for my weekly needs which means sandwiches, toast and the like. For a long time I've been doing pan loaves because that's an easy shape to use for those things. It also let me not worry as much about overly extensible doughs with lots of spelt, etc when I was learning to work with those.
But I got bored, so I bought a clay batard cloche from Breadtopia (https://breadtopia.com/store/breadtopia-cloche-bread-baker-oblong/) and a matching banneton and decided to bake a more artisan-style loaf.
This was a 55% whole wheat loaf: 45% AP from Shepherd's Grain, 45% Yecora Rojo from Breadtopia and 10% spelt. My last bake before this was all Yecora Rojo and although the crumb was tight (partly the flour, partly me) the aroma and flavor from it is great. I used 10% SD starter to leaven and water at 82% hydration.
Autolysed for 90 minutes, mixed for 5 minutes in the KA using a spiral hook and then fermented at 78F with four sets of S&F 30 minutes apart. Bulk was done in 4.5 hours which was a little faster than I anticipated.
Preshaping and shaping were not that hard for a high hydration dough and it went into the banneton for about 15 hours. Popped out the next morning and baked at 450F, 20 mins covered, 25 uncovered.
Comments
Good looking loaf you’ve baked there! Bet it was tasty too.
Benny
It's pretty darn tasty. I want to up the WW percentage and play with a couple other things (seeds, different wheats, etc. ) but this is a nice start I think.
The crumb looks great and the color of the crust is nice and even. The clay baker looks like a winner especially for getting uniform slices of bread.
Don
I wanted something that would be fairly uniform so I could use it for toast, sandwiches etc but a more open crumb that the pan was giving me and this worked well.
This weekend will be a combination of the spelt and Yecora Rojo. I'll post about that in a couple of days.