Pain de Campaign chronicles

Toast

I was in a big-box food-service warehouse, and picked up a big bag of Grain Craft Power Flour ($11/25 lb). It is a commercial pizza flour, and I was aiming to increase the amount of whole grain flour/meal in my PdC without compromising volume. Another option would have been to add vital wheat gluten, but the pizza flour is easier, and we sometimes like commercial style pizza and bagels.

The conventional wisdom for Power Flour is that it wants a lot of mixing. Would it work with "sour dough" and less mixing?, e.g., mixing by hand? (Real sourdough is a powerful dough conditioner, and we can use fineness to avoid work.)

Current practice is to keep a sourdough starter of 100 gr of fresh ground grain hydrated with 66 gr of  water in  the fridge.  The evening before a bake, that gets dumped into 200 grams of fresh ground grain with 400 gr water, mixed and left on the counter overnight.  The next morning, 400 gr Power flower mixed with 12 gr salt, is added by hand fulls to the dough and well stirred.   The last of the flour is kneaded in, the dough covered and left at room temperature for a couple of hours.  About 166 grams of dough is removed to the fridge to be the next starter.  After breakfast, the dough gets several "stretch and  folds" at 20 minute intervals. Then, the dough is left to ferment until after lunch.  The dough gets pre-shaped, rested, shaped, and put in lined baskets. The dough rises until a couple of hours before dinner, when it is baked and cooled in time for dinner.  If  the dough seems to be running behind schedule,  I will warm the oven a bit (e.g., 75F),  turn the oven off and leave the dough in the oven that is slightly warmer than the kitchen.  If the dough is running too fast, it goes in the fridge for a while. The wicker brotforms that I use help keep shaped loaves at a stable temperature during final rise. This all happens about every second or third day, unless I am making other kinds of bread.  This has become our staple bread, often embellished with dried fruit, nuts, or various seeds.  Some of the dough may be reserved back, rolled flat and baked into pita bread.  

Hydration is 66% and salt is 2%. The dough mix is 33% fresh ground whole grain and 66% bread flour. Usual kitchen temperature is around 66F - not unlike San Francisco.  That will change as the weather warms, and everything will have to go a bit faster. (I often use fresh ground flour that is warmer, so YMMV.) I do not put "yeast" in my PdC these days, but I do use commercial yeast 2 or 3 times per month, so I would be surprised if there is no commercial yeast in my starter.