Champlain I

A version of Trevor Wilson's Champlain bread.

Thank you to the community bake thread for this bread for a lot of good advice.

Process

Ambient temperature was 80--82F throughout.

Two days before:take starter from fridge, leave out on counter, feed at 1:3:3 around midnight

One day before: feed 1:3:3 around noon, then 1:3:3 at midnight with 5g start, half whole wheat, half AP

945 Mix dough: 315g water at 90F, 200g KA AP (11.7% gluten), 189g KA bread flour (12.7% gluten), 38g spelt, 19g rye, 315g water. Rubaud to develop. Took 100g of dough and mixed with 50g leaven.

1115 Add leaven to dough

1145 Add 9g salt and 10g water

1215 Fold

1300 Fold

1330 Fold

1400 Fold

1515 Preshape. Care was taken to avoid deflation, and the ball was a little bit looser than usual.

1550 Shape. The round had mostly flattened, but there was noticably tension left in it. Used careful letter folds, then tightened on the counter, then let stand for 5 minutes to seal the seam. It seemed a little bit soft when in the proofing basket, so some light stitching was done to fix it.

1845 Bake. Dutch oven preheated to 475F and lower temperature to 450F. Bake for 20 minutes, then uncover, then bake for 20 more minutes.

Results

I normally bake at 500F, but in an effort to avoid scorched crust, a lower temperature was used. The bottom crust is golden but not burnt. The crumb of this loaf is light and had a noticable chew due to the bread flour. The flavor was mild, with only a hint of sourness.

Future work

While the crumb was fairly light in this loaf, it would be nice to make it lacier. To this end, it might be worth lengthening the bulk a little and perhaps pushing the folds back, since in this schedule, only the final hour of bulk is fold-free.  More generally, my preshaping and shaping skills need work. I think that being more careful than usual on both of those steps was very helpful for this loaf.

I am also unsure of about the impact of the "pseudo-preferment" that was allowed to ferment for just 1.5 hours during the autolyse. The goal was to kick-start the bulk fermentation a bit without having to add more leaven. At the very least, the impact does not seem to have been negative, although further testing is needed to see if it is actually beneficial.