Not a misprint, but I thought why not use two bigas? One yeasted for loft, one SD for flavour. Both in the same tub, to save space and washing up. So that's how it went!
Both bigas made in the kenwood with K beater. I refreshed my SD starter prior to use at 100% to make mxing it into the biga easier.
Overall dough hydration was 69%.
A few months ago I was given some French flour by my sister after her holiday in Brittany. So it was time to have another try at "proper" French pain au levain.
Another Italian style bake using my DIY multi-cereal flour blend, as developed for my recent Pagnotta Multicereali bake.
It comprises 85% Dallagiovanna Manitoba flour with the balance being an equal parts mix of wheat, rye, barley, oats and rice grain all freshly milled together.
I've never had much luck with naturally leavened ciabatta - mine tend to be tough as old boots and with small alveoli, so I used fresh yeast in a 45% hydration biga. 100% of the flour is in the biga.
Following my recent post about posts (!), I thought I had better put my money where my mouth was and submit one of my recent bakes to the forum.
This bake has a bit of a quirky origin: SueVT recently posted about several baking books in Italian and posted a photo of a random recipe showing the effectiveness of smartphone camera translation.
I've been thinking about making a rye tin loaf off and on for a while and chanced upon a Rye Baker TFL post:
https://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/44945/outstanding-russian-rye-bread-moskovskiy-rzhannoye-khlebv
The post came with a nice looking loaf, so I thought I would give it a try.
As always, a few tweaks:
I recently baked (and enjoyed!) Benny's Chocolate Olive Oil cake. It reminded me that a while ago I made a very tasty German chocolate cake and I thought I would make it again. Unfortunately I had lost the link to the recipe, but after a lot of searching, I found it again - only to find that the link had broken! Fortunately The Wayback machine came to the rescue.
The recipe is in a sense totally the opposite of Benny's cake, using chocolate, not cocoa and butter, not olive oil. It is very rich, but very tasty.
A slightly experimental bake, with a stiff French levain (for raising power), a liquid levain (for pH reduction) and an overnight yeasted sponge (for flavour).
All went well, but bulk (to 60% vol increase) was rather fast at 2hrs 10m. Retarded, shaped and baked the following day.
As soon as I turned out the loaves from the bannetons onto the peel they started to spread and I realised the loaves were "classically" overproofed.
Sure enough, the ears and loft were poor and the crumb was closer, more regular and more "frogspawn" than I like.
A recent comment by Michael Lily regarding dough bulk volume increase got me thinking about a topic I have already given a lot of thought to - volume increase during bulk and it's effect on the final bread.
In that post Michael suggested a bulk volume increase of 20% to improve oven spring, which I would agree with, but I think there may be a downside in terms of flavour development.
I recently bought some French Foricher T65 flour whilst shopping for some other flours.
I hadn't got a particular recipe in mind when I bought it, but then it became obvious that the first thing to try was an authentic "pain au levain".
I became rather interested in the original method for making pain au levain which dates from 1778 (or earlier) as detailed in Parmentier's "Le parfait boulanger, ou Traité complet sur la fabrication et le commerce du pain (Éd.1778)". The method is known as "travail sur trois levains", or work on three levains.
I chanced upon some interesting YouTube videos of the JWU Bread Symposium 2021. One of them was a prebiotic bread by Michael Kalanty He uses a sourdough leavened soaker of home milled wheat grits, oats and flax seed to develop prebiotic bacteria.
It sounded interesting so I decided to give it a go and (painfully!) transcribed most of the recipe from the video and guessed a few missing bits.
It went something like this:
Prebiotic Bread Michael Kalanty
Description
