Questions about baking with sprouted flour
Hello everyone,
If you bake with sprouted flour and have some tricks to share, I would greatly appreciate it. I made my first bread with sprouted flour today, Multigrain Struan from Reinhardt's Whole Grain Baking. It is a recipe that uses biga and a soaker, and proceeds to combine the two with other ingredients (flour, yeast, honey, oil, salt) during the final dough mixing. then bulk fermentation, dividing the dough and final rising. The loaves start out in 425F oven with normal steam, but once the loaves are placed there, the temperature is lowered to 350F. Loaves bake about 40 min and are rotated half-way through the bake. I followed the recipe and baked on quarry tiles. I made two loaves (one batard in La Cloche and one loaf in a loaf pan) with organic stone-ground whole wheat and two with organic sprouted (also one batard in La Cloche and one loaf in a loaf pan) for comparison.
Sprouted flour loaves of either shape did not rise much in the oven, and the scored area sort of sank in. Stone-ground flour loaves of both shapes had great oven spring and the scoring worked out fine as well. Now, the taste... Sprouted loaves were chewy and a bit "wet" to the taste, a bit sweeter than the stone-ground ones, with a more pronounced nutty flavor. Yummy and delicous is the only word to describe them! Now if I could only make them more visually attractive. So, if you have secrets to share, I am eager to learn! Thank you so much in advance.
Kroha