Today's bake was Hamelman's Pain au Levain with Whole Wheat Flour. This is one of a series of versions of Pain au Levain in Bread. I have baked all of them - several, like this one, many times. My favorite is whichever one just cooled enough to eat. This one was pretty yummy. Crunchy crust, chewy crumb. Complex wheaty flavor.
Pretty loaves, too, if I do say so myself.
This bake followed my usual formula, except I increased the hydration slightly, adding an extra 20 g of water to the final dough. The formula and procedures can be found here: San Joaquin Sourdough: Update
Susan and I have just returned from two weeks in Italy. We spent a week in Venice, a couple days in Lucca and 4 days in Liguria. We broke up our return trip with an overnight stay in Milan. I am happy to report that the bread we had was much superior to that of our last visit to Amelia-Romagna and Tuscany three years ago.
The bread we were served in restaurants was almost always made wholly with white flour.
There is a traditional type of test question in medicine called “visual diagnosis.” The student is shown a photo - it might be of a whole person, a face or just a piece of skin with a rash - and asked to make a diagnosis. The last time I took a test like that was for board certification in Pediatrics. That was in 1977, and I can still remember most of the photos I was shown - a young girl with an inguinal hernia, a teenage boy’s feet (They were flat.), a rash (Scabies), a child with a rare genetic condition (Progeria). I think there were a couple more.
I usually make this bread as 500g boules, but the beautiful large bâtards and miches I've seen from Josh, Syd and others in the past week or so had me craving a larger loaf. So this 1kg bâtard was baked this afternoon, and it is good. I think it's kind of pretty, too.
Yesterday, I baked the "Finnish Rye" from the SFBI for the second time. It is a delicious bread, although what makes it Finnish and why it's called a rye, since it has less rye than either white or whole wheat flour, remains mysterious. I described how I made it in my previous post ("Finnish Rye" from the SFBI.
My wife and I have been taking Italian language lessons in a small group for about 2 years. Our teacher was born in Palermo and trained to be a teacher from 16 years old through University. She has lived in the US for about 15 years, and she misses Sicily a lot, including the bread.
I have made the Pane Valle Maggia (or "Pane Maggiore") 3 previous times. I have decided I actually liked the first version the best, so I made it again today. The procedure was substantially the same. See Pane Valle del Maggia.
In my opinion, the formula for 5-Grain Levain by itself fully justifies the price of Jeffrey Hamelman's Bread. This is just one of several formulas for multigrain breads in the book. I believe I have made all the levain-based ones, and I haven't found one that wasn't scrumptious. I think my very favorite is actually the one that uses a rye sour for leavening.
After the last bake of this bread, I wondered if I could get a more open crust by doing all the mixing by hand, rather than some by machine. So, that's what I did. The formula was the same as that used in Pane Valle Maggia, ver. 2 3/7/2014, except I did not take the time to grind fresh whole wheat flour. I used Giusto's Organic Fine Whole Wheat flour instead.
My procedure was as follows:
