A 1.75 kg loaf from high extraction (85%) stone ground flour, mixed in a stand mixer.
ingredients: flour, water, salt, and egg white glaze
procedure :
Weigh a kilo of flour and 20 grams of salt
Put 300 grams of very active, very liquid, starter in stand mixer
Add 300 gm water, mix in enough flour by hand fulls to make a thick batter.
Let ferment at 68F, for a 3 hours.
Add 300 gm water, and mix in enough to make enough flour to make a thick batter.
Let ferment at 68F, for a 3 hours.
Add in ~200 gm water , all the salt and flour by handfuls while mixing - this should make a very stiff dough.
Slowly dribble in enough water while mixing to make a dough the consistency of baguette dough.
Let ferment a couple of hours, round up, bench rest, shape loaf, and let rise in banneton.
Bake on stone at 400F convection.
This was mixed in an old stand mixer. It does not mix as well or a fast as newer mixers. In this case, I think the longer, slower mixing which works very well with the high extraction flour.
Total elapsed time from putting starter in kettle to out of the oven was ~12 hours. Fermenting a very soft dough speeds the timeline.
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Current rational and philosophy of baking:
I grind my own flour, including some sprouted grain, then I sift it, so I do not know how much water to add (hydration) to make the dough texture that I want. In the end, I ALWAYS must adjust hydration. If I always must adjust hydration, why put significant effort into measuring water and flour? - eyeball measurements are good enough! (Actually, I have a plastic canister that holds ~1 kilo of my HEF. I put 20 grams of salt in the bottom and fill it with HEF. Water is measured with a quart canning jar. Starter is kept in a quart canning jar.)
Some of the little critters in the starter need some acid to make their magic, so just dumping a couple of kilos of flour and water into the starter does not work as well as adding some flour and water, mixing, waiting, and then adding some more, mixing and waiting, then adding the salt and adding more flour and water. All the steps in a classic multi-day sourdough recipe are there, it is just that with high extraction flour, a good starter, and high hydration dough, the process can be done in one long day. It is better if it gets 8 or 12 hours in the refrigerator. In a commercial operation, I would certainly extend the process to 18 or 20 hours.
The high extraction flour wants a long, long autolyze. It needs a long soak to get fully hydrated to allow good gluten development, before a final adjustment of hydration for texture.
This dough has a lot of mixing, perhaps a total of 20 or 25 minutes of slow mixing. I think the long mixing contributes to more volume and lighter color. Could I get that with a shorter mixing period at higher speed or a more efficient mixer? I do not know. I do know that so far this dough works much better in my big old slow mixer. I expect it would also work well (maybe better) with hand kneading.
I like the way big loaves bake - I think they tend to capture the subtle flavors in the dough better than small loaves. I mean we go to a lot of effort to produce more flavorful doughs - then we bake them in little loaves, so those flavors evaporate off into the oven and up the vent. If you are going to bake exceptional breads, you need a way to hold those flavors inside the loaf. One approach is big loaves. Lionel Poilane had good reason to focus on loaves of just under 2 kilo. Today, I think that size is one of the things that made the traditional Pain de Campagne special. With a stone, they can be baked in a modern electric oven.