I have setup a granite slab to bake some baggies up to 12" long. Following Alfonso's setup, this one seems to work quite well. My oven has no bottom heating element, so I have to flip the baggies to color their bottoms. No big deal, and some initial poolish baggies yield seen below. Yep, they look more like batards, but tasted great.
I have another experiment using minimal amount of starter. This time I have not built any levain, and mixed 1 g starter with other ingredients. I tried to adjust the process to my schedule, which is mix in the morning, bulk ferment during the day, shape in the evening, retard overnight and bake in the following morning.
This is an update on the small amount starter experiment. I followed Dab's suggestion to drop the starter amount to 1 g and reduce the amount of fermented flour in the levain.
The levain was built using 1g starter, 10 g bread flour and 10 g water. Left to mature on the counter at 30C for about 8 hours. The final dough was comprised of 220 g total flour (including levain's flour) and 75% hydration. I used a similar flour mix as in the first experiment: 50% bread flour and the rest a mix of white spelt, rye and ruchmehl (half-half whole wheat).
This is a small loaf built with a levain made with 1.5 g starter, 30 g water and 30 g bread flour. The levain was left to mature for about 12 hours on the counter at about 30 C room temperature. It was not used at its peak, since I could see that it receded way before I arrived home from work.
Fellow Bakers,
I had the opportunity to get some special flour named Ruchmehl, which is used to make a darker bread in Switzerland. It is some sort of half-half wheat flour that provides a darker color to the crumb and nutty flavor. This flour is widely used in Switzerland for their daily bread.
The process was quite standard.
Levain:
10 g starter
50 g Ruchmhel
50 g water
Matured for about 18 hrs, which produced some sour notes to the bread flavor.
Dough:
All levain
245 g Ruchmehl
I have been quite busy lately, but haven't stopped baking. By the way, is it my impression or the number of posts has increased significantly lately? I can't keep up with so much information anymore.
Baked two loaves this weekend, a record batch for me. Both 75% hydration and 20% levain. Some mixed cold bulk fermentation and cold proofing. Top loaf was 25% dark rye + 5% red fife, while the lower loaf 20% dark rye. The lower loaf was given as gift, so no crumb shot. The pic below is for the crumb shot of the top loaf along with my lunch yesterday.
peter
