I decided the time had come for a little experiment to try and shed some light on the dark art of bulk fermentation and the influence different percentage volume increases might have on the final loaf.
I started with a pretty standard dough recipe as follows:
I recently chanced upon an interesting recipe in the excellent Baecker Suepke's blog.
It is for a Black Forest chocolate cherry sourdough bread. The Modernist Bread version springs to mind, but the Black Forest one is different - not sweet, apart from the cherries - and it has toasted sunflower and pumpkin seeds. I also added some non-salted pistachio seed, which gave a rather nice contrasting green colour.
Recently, my loaves have not been fully up to scratch – a bit spready on the peel, poor loft and poor ears.
My starter seemed to be performing OK, but sometimes with starters, who knows? I’m not the sort of baker who would cherish a 100 year old starter, so time to try a new one!
I've had a good few discussions lately about domestic oven steaming, notably with DanAyo and Doc.Dough.
I've tried various in-oven solutions over the last year or two with good, but not great results. It was also getting to the point where it was taking longer to set the oven up than it was to do the actual baking!
I became convinced that the best way forward was to generate steam externally and introduce it into the oven. This blog post gives some details of the practicalities of how I achieved this.
I chanced upon a long TFL post Chasing thin, crispy, not thick/tough dough A comment by Mariana regarding a 100% sponge method loaf caught my eye. I think Mariana made it in a bread machine, but the loft was incredible. I've been thinking of making a tin loaf for a while, so this was the perfect opportunity.
I've decided I don't really like the taste of wheat bran in a loaf that much. It's fine up to about 30% wholewheat in a loaf, but after that, I find the strong, bitter flavour of the bran is not really that nice.
One way round it is to sieve out the bran and put it in your muesli, so really you are baking with high extraction flour, but for this bake, I decided to try something a little different.
I haven't baked a white loaf since my disastrous encounter with Leckford Estate bread flour, so I thought it was time to excise some demons and have another try - with a different flour!
Having had success with a bulk retard in my last bake A Trio of High Extraction Loaves I decided to use the same technique again.
It's been abnormally hot in Deepest Lancashire (as with most of the UK) these past couple of months. So much so that my normal 900g batardes are going stale before we finish them. The obvious solution was to make something a bit smaller, so I split my usual dough quantity, based on 1kg flour, into three loaves, each around 670g unbaked weight.
I'm also currently exploring retarded bulk fermentation, so I incorporated that into this bake.
Flour mix
