Hi bakers,
I'm messing around with a rye/polenta/pepita dough, based on the Tartine loaf but with a fair number of tweaks. I've substituted 20% rye flour with the remaining 80% being bread flour, thrown in 8.5% honey and a little extra water. Without the polenta soaker the hydration is a hair over 72%. In the Tartine book Chad doesn't make any mention of adjusting the basic country loaf hydration based on the extra water used to soak the polenta, but I've got to say the dough is crazy-sticky and loose. My 9-month-old has decided that sleep is for suckers so I'm almost dizzy with exhaustion and definitely not firing on all cylinders; for this test batch today I had to do a lot of fiddly math, and I'm wondering whether in my perpetual haze I did it wrong. Has anyone else making the original version of this loaf noticed the dough being particularly sticky/wet?
in one professional bakery where they make similar dough with polenta. After mixing this dough was looking like being the strongest one, but at the end of fermentation was the weakest one - quite loose and sticky. The baker told me in advance that this will occur. I don't know if he has reduced the hydration.
The final bread was perfect, but it was a little bit tricky for shaping. After divide phase it was shaped and retarded for about 16 hours at approx 8dC. You can try to reduce the hydration and see if it helps.
Happy baking ifaey,
Joze.
I made a new batch this morning to see whether my math was off yesterday and nope- it was exactly as you describe. Starts out strong, then as soon as you add the polenta just kind of falls apart and continues to do so through five hours of s and f's. But! The loaves I baked off this morning from yesterday's mix (overnight shaped cold proof, maybe 38F or so) didn't turn out too pretty- they spread enough that the edges touched the dutch oven, which I hate- but the crumb was WONDERFUL. Custardy, even, and rich and delicious. So wonderful that I'm making much smaller boules today for tomorrow morning's bake, to see whether they turn out prettier if they're too small to touch the edges of the DO. What I was wondering about was the fact that the loaves I see others posting with more or less the same formula have quite a bit more lift, more like the OG Tartine country loaf.
It must be the addition of the rye, the honey, and the slight uptick in hydration (maybe 3% or so).
Though out of curiosity I'll probably also try a batch with lower hydration, see if I can keep the honey and rye and still make it a little more workable.