Olive Boule
It's been a while since my last post. The day job has been keeping me quite busy and I haven't had the bandwidth to bake bread as much as I would like. I'm baking every third weekend to keep the bread box full and the freezer stocked. My go-to bread has been Ken Forkish's overnight country blonde (just like I posted here: http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/41150/overnight-country-blonde-fwsy [1]). It's mostly hands off and seems to work well especially with the mild San Francisco temperatures we've been experiencing lately.
I decided to shake things up and bake something else. This weekend's bake was an olive boule made with 50% liquid levain and 60% water in the final dough. That gave me an overall hydration of 68%. Hydration-wise, 68% is pretty much as low as I go for a lean dough.
The resulting crumb was not too open which was a good way to keep in those delicious olives. The complex tangy taste of my bread was due to the age of my starter. I keep my stiff maintenance starter in the refrigerator unfed and then feed/build it using dabrownman's no fuss method whenever I want to bake.
Olive Bread
- 80% AP flour
- 20% whole rye flour
- 60% water
- 2.4 % salt
- 50% levain (100% hydration, 20% rye)
- 30% pitted Kalamata olives
- Mixed all ingredients by hand.
- Bulk fermented for 3 hours at room temperature (about 70F) with 4 sets of stretches and folds during the first 2 hours and untouched during the third hour.
- Preshaped and bench rested for 30 minutes.
- Shape retarded in the refrigerator (40F) for 12 hours.
- Baked at 450F for 35 minutes (for 600 grams dough).
:) Mary