50% Wholewheat Community Bake - Danni’s version

I loved all the posts on the community bake and decided to join in on the fun with a few adaptations of course! ?Here is my version:

Diastatic Malt

4 Days before:

1. Soak 1 cup of Selkirk wheat berries in filtered water for 6 hours. Drain and leave on the counter rinsing every 6-8 hours. 
2. Twenty-four hours later, hubby announces that he accidentally smashed the jar with the sprouting berries. ? After I freaked out on him ? because I won’t have enough time now to make this diastatic malt (it is Wednesday and I need it for Saturday), he runs and gets me another cup of wheat berries. I decide to give it another shot and hope that by using a very warm spot, it will speed things along. I place the soaking berries in the oven with the light on and the door cracked open (this creates a temperature of around 82F). 
3. After 6 hours, I drain them and put them back into the warm spot and continue rinsing every few hours. A minor miracle happens ??and 48 hours later, I have sprouted berries with green shoots by Friday morning. I then dried them in the oven using the lights again with the door occasionally cracked open to let the water vapor out. The oven is about 100F with the door closed and about 82F with the door held open with a wooden spoon. It took 24 hours for the berries to be rock hard.
4. I milled them using my Komo mill on the finest setting. This took a bit as the rootlets and the shoots did not flow smoothly into the milling chamber. I had to help things along a bit by pushing the berries into the hole at the bottom of the hopper. I certainly hope that all of this hassle making this malt will be worth it!

Recipe:

Makes 3 boules

Starter:

60 g starter

30 g unbleached all purpose flour

70 g soaked bran (explanation in directions)

30 g water at 90F

Main dough:

559 g high extraction Selkirk wheat flour (explanation below)

292 g Rogers Bread Flour

266 g Rogers Unbleached No Additives All Purpose flour

50 g freshly ground flax

12 g Diastatic malt

936 g water at ~90F divided (explanation below)

25 g Himalayan pink salt

30 g full fat local yogurt

158 g levain (explanation below)

2 Days before:

1. Revive your starter by feeding it about 1:1:1 every 6-8 hours. I initially used plain all purpose flour but once I had milled the flour for the bread, I used the left over high extraction flour and some bran.

1 Day before:

1. Mill 625 g of Selkirk wheat berries and sift to obtain 559 g of high extraction wholewheat flour and ~60 g of bran. I also had a bit of the high extraction flour left over so I used that and some of the bran to feed my seed starter in order to continue getting it up to speed.
2. Place the high extraction whole wheat flour, bread flour, a/p flour, the flax and malt in a container and reserve.
3. Take 30 g of bran and soak it in 40 g of water and a bit of the starter. This is to break down the bran and soften it as much as possible before using it in the levain and the dough.

Dough Day:

1. Make the levain: Mix 60 g of the activated starter with the soaked bran, the unbleached flour and 30 g of water at 90F. I then placed it in my trusty warm spot. This will make a bit more than needed and it is probably thicker than in the original recipe due to the bran. This was mixed at 11:30 am which is about an hour longer than Maurizio specifies in his recipe. The reason is because I only used half of the water at his specified temperature so I figured it might take a tad longer to mature. 
2. Well, the levain was zooming along so after 2 hours and 15 minutes, I took it out of the warm spot and put it on the counter to slow it down! 
3. I also decided to start the mixing and autolyse a bit early since I am making 4 batches of this dough and I need time to mix it all. At 2 pm, I mixed 836 g of 91F water with the reserved flour mix until all the flour was hydrated and at 2:15 pm, I placed the dough in the warm spot in the oven. The remaining water will be added with the levain and the salt. 
4. Two hours later, I added 30 g yogurt, 50 g water and 158 g levain. I mixed it in well and did probably 30-40 in bucket folds to get it all mixed in. I let the dough rest while I mixed the other batches. Then I did 100 slap and folds on the counter, spread the dough out, sprinkled the salt and another 25 g water (I decided that  the whole remaining 50 g would be too much), did another 50 slaps and folds and placed the dough back into its bucket. The dough went back into its warm spot. This took me 45 minutes for 4 batches of dough and gave me a really good upper arm workout!
5. During bulk fermentation, I did 5 sets of folds half an hour apart as per Maurizio’s instructions. The dough felt very loose at the beginning. Then it started tightening up nicely. I used Maurizio’s two handed stretch with a ferret coil at the end of the four folds. After the 5 folds, I left the dough to rise in its warm spot for another hour and half. Bulk fermentation was a total of 3 and half hours.
6. I divided the dough into portions of about 760 g each. Some flour was sprinkled over the portions and I rounded the boules using my scraper. I must say that this is getting a lot easier. The dough didn’t stick to the scraper, or to me for a change. After a 20 minute rest, I followed Maurizio’s instructions for shaping: “Flip one resting round over so the floured side is down on the work surface. Fold the top of the dough up and over to the middle and repeat for the bottom (you’ll now have a long slender rectangle in front of you). Pickup the rectangle and rotate it 90º so it’s now lengthwise facing you. Grab the dough at the very top and fold over a little ways, press to seal with the main mass of the dough. Now grab this rolled over top and gently continue to roll it down towards the bottom, tucking in the dough as you go (imagine rolling down a beach towel). At the end of this you’ll have a tube that has essentially been rolled downward.”  I was very surprised at how little flour was used this time. It was about half of what I usually use for shaping. This dough was really nice to work with!
7. The boules went seam side down into bannetons sprinkled with some of the leftover bran. Plastic bowl covers used to cover the bannetons. Finally, the bannetons were placed into a cold fridge (38F) for 10-11 hours.
8. The next morning, heat the oven to 475F with the dutch ovens inside for at least 45 minutes. Place rounds of parchment paper in the bottom of the pots, score the loaves, and gently place the dough seam side up inside. I turn out the dough onto a cornmeal sprinkled counter first, score, then place it into the pots. 
9. Cover the pots and bake the loaves at 450 F for 25 minutes, remove the lids, drop the temperature to 425F, and bake for another 22 minutes.

The scores really didn’t open up much but the boules are nicely full and round. They feel nice and light so I am hopeful for a decent crumb. Right now the first two batches are cooling and the last two batches are about to go in.