Out of the cold into the fire (brick)
The nights are getting colder here, my thoughts have been turning to overnight outdoor proofing schemes.
For this bread, I started with a 45 min. autolyse, then minimal machine mixing in stages. The bulk ferment was in the five hour range.
The loaves spent the night, seam down in baskets, and coved up inside of a large plastic box outside in the cold.
Outside the temp. dropped to +5c, I suspect that inside the box it was closer to +9.
At 3am, i got up to plug the oven in, at 6am, I felt sorry for them, brought them into the house and pealed them directly into a good hot 250c oven [1].
They were clearly proofed to a delicate state, scoring them wasn’t a consideration, one did a stick and collapse on me, the other three were fine.
The flour bill was quite simple on this one; 80% swiss bread flour (Halbweissmehl), 20% rye flour.
The rye built the levain, roughly half of it was fresh off the mill, unsifted.
0.5 % fresh yeast went into the final dough, the total water was around 75%, salt 2.1
Flavour wise, the acidity was somewhat up front but still polite, the crust was well caramelised and it’s aroma made itself known deep into the crumb.
The crumb was well gelatinised and held it'd freshness well dispite the high white flour content.
It was a decent enough batch and gave me a few ideas for the next round.
cheers
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