Tasty 50% WW Frisbee

I had 50% WW flour to use, and having enjoyed my last bake with Modernist Cuisine's "French Lean Bread" recipe, I thought I'd just try adapting that. A little Googling turned up this article [www.crumblycookie.net] which discussed P. Reinhart's Whole Grains method of two overnight soaks – half the flour with yeast, half with salt. That piqued my curiosity, so I tried to strike a balance between that idea and the MC recipe by expanding the existing poolish recommended in MC, and soaking the rest of the flour with water (but no salt). Well, expanding the poolish was a blockheaded idea, since that left the remaining flour with only enough water for about 25% hydration! It wasn't a dough – more like a desert stew, with little gobbets of dough huddling together in a dune of loose flour.

Well. I didn't want to add extra water and throw off the ratio, so I let it be overnight. When I went to mix the two halves yesterday morning, the little lumps of dough seemed quite hard, and almost impossible to "iron out." I was despondent. But miraculously, after bulk ferment, the lumps were gone! Bread baking is truly a surprising journey.

In the end, I was quite happy with the taste and the crumb. Unfortunately it turned out to be a low-rise loaf. I think the culprit may be my shaping (not enough surface tension), but only more practice will allow me to differentiate between that and under-proofing etc.