March 14, 2017 - 10:50am
First Freshly Milled Loaves
My parents bought me a Komo mill for my 50th birthday. These Hamelman WW multigrain loaves used 50% freshly milled whole grains on the finest setting, and included an overnight soaker of cracked wheat/cornmeal/sesame seeds.
The crumb is as soft as sandwich bread, which is a total surprise. All other factors were my normal routine, including adding a considerable amount of water during to mix to achieve medium looseness, 4 folds over about 3 hours (more than Hamelman calls for) and a 30 hour cold retard.
Does anyone else find that freshly milled flour yield a softer crumb?
Share
Comments
These look delicious! I'm inspired to try fresh milled flour one day. You said you didn't feel you had to make many adaptations based on the feel of the dough, that it was it similar to previous bakes with the same recipe. I'm really surprised by that. Fascinating! (Edited comment after re-reading original post)
Well, it's become my practice, and with this recipe especially so due to the variability of the makeup of the soaker in this recipe (use whatever you want!), to really go by the look and feel of the dough. In fact I have little idea what the hydration was, but I suspect that using the whole berry, and with it the germ that commercial mills do not include (as dabrownman tells me), the flour requires more water.
In that sense, no, I just did what I do now, and added as much water during the mix as seemed necessary to achieve "medium looseness."
Soon, perhaps next bake, I will use the Komo sifter attachment I also got and use dabrownman's trick of sifting the hard bits and using all of them in the levain. This softens them, provides a great deal of food to the "wee beasties," makes the bigger pieces more digestible, and should result in less gluten slicing and thus a better crumb.
a good mill to bring it up another level. A bran levain will also make it better and then sprouted grains will take it over the top. Very well done indeed. I'm really surprised that you talked about the soft crumb rather than how much better the bread tastes with whole fresh milled grain in the mix! You will love that mill!
Happy Baking Filomatic
It certainly is tasty, no doubt. The texture was so different it really took me by surprise. The taste was not markedly better than other breads I've made, and I don't know if it was the tastiest one ever. It's hard to judge. Bottom line, I am going to be using this mill every time! I'm interested to try your sifting method and see if I can succeed with 100% freshly milled flour.
Well, I just tasted it again and the flavor is deeper. I have to say it's surprisingly full flavored. The crumb is still tender with no denseness, despite a not greatly open crumb, even as it has started to dry out.
I have the smaller Komo mill and discovered something that is not in the user manual. You can continue turning the adjustment wheel to the back corners of the mill for either ultra fine or ultra coarse grinds, simply going past the markers on the front of the mill. I discovered this when grinding yellow field corn and the mill was having difficulty getting the corn down into the grinding stones. The folks at Pleasant Hill Grain pointed out this feature of the mill to me in order to grind the corn better. And they mentioned that it also worked for doing a finer grind than the markers on the front of the mill enabled.
Cool, thanks for the tip.