So I tried the Kamut recipe from Tartine 3, and have a questions. I have not made too much bread, and probably got a little too ambitious with this one. It is the highest hydration I have worked with, and the 1st time using the flour. A few things went wrong. When I woke up my oven was not working and it took me a little to find a gfi outlet had popped, and by this time I did not have enough time to bake the loafs before work. So I packed them in the car, it was a out 30°f. This was around 4 AM. Luckily I work somewhere we use an oven that has steams, so I figured I would try it out. I guess I waa wondering if this bread looked under proofed?
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Looks perfect to me. Congrats!
Thanks, it just seems a little denser then my past breads. Didn't know if it was the new flour, or if I under proofed it. The air bubble under the crust comes from too hot of an oven?
is close, or close enough, to the picture on page 71 of the Tartine No. 3 book.
Kamut, and durum which it is closely related to, have high protein, but not as good gluten-forming properties as wheat. Also, this formula, with lots of bran (60% of flour is whole grain Kamut; and 20% is "high extraction" wheat, meaning there's some more bran there, too) takes special or precise working to get a fluffy-puffy crumb.
Also, keep in mind that you likely made just one cut and photographed it. In preparing the book, we can very logically assume that the professional photographer (and/or Chad) kept on slicing that loaf, or even several, until he found the absolute perfect, or "most best", for the photo. (Just checked, the photos in T3 are copyrighted by Chad.)
BTW, I bake mostly 90-100% whole grain loaves, and most often include some home-milled whole-grain Kamut. I'm sort of losing my love affair with it, as it doesn't have the flavor profile that I like most, and it makes it harder to get a good rise. In my opinion/experience, it needs to be the "minority partner" in a loaf, no more than 25% of total flour, with another 10-25% being white/sifted (ie, AP or Bread) flour. That's just within my experience and methodology, Your mileage may vary, of course.
I bought 75 pounds of whole Kamut berries in early 2018, and that batch was the cleanest/healthiest-looking grains I've purchased. It must have been a good clean harvest. Virtually no blackpoint, less than any other wheat, red or white that I've ever purchased, and extremely few shrunken, green, damaged, or dessicated kernals. I hand sort all my wheat before milling, and it goes quickest with the Kamut. I even looked up the US official grading specifications for Grade 1 (the top), Grade 2 etc. wheat. And this batch/harvest of Kamut was just superb, having only a fraction of damaged/infected kernals that are allowed in Grade 1.
In the past, I have purchased whole wheat berries that were barely Grade 1. And I had one bag of wheat that was barely Grade 2, but that may have been because the blackpoint may have spread in the two or so years I had stored the plain paper bag without further sealing it air-tight.
But, wheat quality varies from farm to farm, field to field, and year to year. Commercial millers re-work their blending formulas at least with each harvest, and maybe with each shipment, to keep commercial flour consistent as possible from year to year, and batch to batch.
When us home-bakers purchase unblended flour, as whole-grain flour is, there is very little reason to suppose it is going to have the exact same baking characteristics as similar flour purchased years earlier, and from different farmers, even though the variety of grain is the same. If nothing else, the moisture content of the grain, or flour, is going to vary by how the long the whole berries sat around, or how long the milled flour has sat around, and the humidity levels in the warehouses and stores and homes in which they sat. (Millers "temper" grain to a standard moisture content before milling, but once the flour is shipped off, then all bets are off.)
Thank you, I left the book at home. I will take a look when I get out of work.