Soakers with Trevor's technique
I love Trevor Wilson's sourdough technique and use it a lot, the overnight 'kind of autolyse' and then work in your ripe starter the following morning suits me and I get good results. However I have got very into adding grains and seeds to bread recently and wondered how I could achieve this using Trev's method. For example if I wished to add a quantity of buckwheat berries? Groats? Whatever you call them, or indeed any mix of grains/seeds would I be able to just throw them in the mix the night before and increase the hydration accordingly? Or might I be better doing the usual soaker technique and attempting to work that in along with the starter inoculation in the morning? I will experiment if no one has tried previously but hoped someone may have been here before and if so can save me from baking disappointments.
Thanks.
depends on what you want them to add to the texture, as well as the flavour, of the loaf.
Most whole grains (buckwheat groats, oats, millet, some wheat berries, etc.) will soften somewhat during an overnight soak in room temperature water, but will retain some hardness / crunchiness. If this is what you want, and you aren't using much of them, then adding them in with the rest of the flour and suitable hydration for an overnight soak will work fine.
You will have to be careful, though, since some grains (rye or durum wheat berries, for instance) really don't soften up much with that technique, and require either a scald (where you pour boiling water over them and let it sit overnight) or actually cooking them as a porridge to get them soft enough that they won't be breaking teeth. If you want / need to use either of these techniques, then you could scald / cook them first (with the necessary water) and then throw them in with the overnight soak, or you could mix them in with the levain in the morning, or you could incorporate them later on by doing a stretch-and-fold on the bench and "folding" them in.
For softer grains where I'm not using very much (such as oats), I find that including them in the overnight soak works fine, and doesn't cause too much issue with the development of the gluten matrix. For the harder grains, I prefer to cook them in to a porridge and then fold them on the second set of stretch-and-folds. I find that this gives me a dough with an overall stronger gluten matrix, and that the less-mixed clumps of porridge give a more interesting texture to the final loaf.
It really is about what you want from the addition, so give the different options a try and see what you like the best!
You have confirmed what I was thinking. I will have a play around and see what happens. Hamelman's multigrain uses the overnight scalded soaker and is a wonderful loaf which is barely any more work than Trevor's sourdough so I'm almost wondering why I would stray from that formula, but these experiments are such good fun and I can't help tweaking things. Onwards... Thanks again.