As some of you may have seen in my last few entries, I have been working on whole grain breads and particularly working on when I can tell when my loaf is ready for the oven. My last whole wheat loaf turned out to be a bit over proofed, and the time before, my whole wheat levain was underproofed. But I did not get discouraged, in fact, I made an agreement to keep on baking a loaf minimum each week, whether it is a sourdough whole wheat bread or a overnight autolyse expedition from Reinhart.

This time I went with the Multigrain Straun from Whole Grain Bread. Nothing seperates this from the formula in the book, I followed it closely, substituted the honey for agave though, mixed, let it rise, shaped and preheated the oven and stone and carefully, carefully, paid attention to the bread to find out when it was ready for the oven.

I pushed my clock aside this time and watched it on and off while studying assuring myself I would catch the loaf at it's prime and place it in the oven then! So I poked it at 30 minutes, it didn't really do much, so I went back to studying. About ten minutes later I poked it, it sprung back a bit, so I decieded to check back in five, and sure enough, the loaf sprung back about half way. So, being frantic I hastily scored the top of the loaf (resulting in what I thought to be a poor score pattern) and placed it on the stone, steamed and baked.

The end result...a loaf I am quite pleased with! And look - No finger indentations this time!

And then the crumb...

And now with my skills just a bit more sharpened when it comes to proofed dough, I think this coming week I will try my hand again at Hamelman's Whole Wheat Levain, hopefully resulting in a wonderful loaf with much better scoring.

Oh, and I managed to bake a blueberry coffee cake with a cinnamon streusel topping, delicious!