Great Bake!

Yet another twist on this unpredictable batch of bread... This is about a 60% semolina bread, not quite adhering to the community bake, but somewhere in that ballpark. I've worked with durum flour before to much better results, and I know of the challenges it poses with its lack of extensibility and high protein content. But still, this is a whole other level of dense for me. The crumb is almost gummy, despite the normal bake time- 500 F for 20 minutes in a preheated combo cooker, followed by 20 minutes with the lid off at 450 to set in the crust. Really rather unpleasant, hopefully the batard is better- its a completely different dough, a blend of high ash wheat flour (type 110 from central milling) with whole spelt. Fingers crossed. For comparison, here's the last loaf I made with this formula- definitely on the denser side, but not like this.

So after cutting into that prior loaf, I opted to just feed it to the squirrels, because frankly, it was kinda... not good. That and I run a squirrel restaurant, and walnuts are expensive, so I'm always looking to cut corners. Seriously, I have 4-6 rodent patrons that will eat through a pint of food in a half an hour. So after relegating my sad loaf to my arboreal friends, I decided to slice into my wheat-rye-spelt loaf. And what I found was, again, seriously unexpected. This is the kind of wild, uneven crumb you get from an underproofed loaf in my experience, and I thought that these were seriously overproofed. (I sat down on the couch after preshaping the dough in my kitchen and then woke up 4 hours later. This made for a nearly 9 hour bulk at 71 F, with loaves that had a high percentage of whole grain and about 20% inoculation each.) My best guess is that I missed some large bubbles that were introduced during lamination, a dope technique I copy from fullproofbaking/joyride coffee of youtube sourdough fame. I also may have misjudged the extent of fermentation; the temperature in my kitchen can fluctuate and sometimes drop to 65 F between heating cycles, and with such small loaves the temperature can really fluctuate quickly. Maybe that, in combination with me doing a very short, cold proof, resulted in underfermentation... ? Who knows. All I know is this bake had more twists than a shayamalan flick.