rosemary & meyer lemon pain au levain

The extraordinary heat and humidity of the past few weeks in NYC has meant that I haven't been baking. But I took advantage of a few cooler evenings and produced this last night: a mashup of the Della Fattoria pain au levain -- https://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/44078/pain-au-levain-della-fattoria-bread -- and rosemary & meyer lemon boule -- https://lisaiscooking.blogspot.com/2015/01/meyer-lemon-rosemary-campagne-boule.html.

I did this one 'jailbreak' style -- meaning I mixed all the ingredients and left the dough on the counter for almost 12 hours. Then I did a few sets of stretch and folds, and popped it in the fridge for another 12 hours. When I pulled the dough from the fridge, I gave it a short rest on the counter and one more set of folds. Then I added the citrus zest/rosemary/olive oil slurry as per the 2nd recipe above.

The only change in the dough formula was that I cut the salt to about 1.2%.

I screwed up the final shaping (for some reason I couldn't get the top of the dough to adhere to itself) and probably used too much olive oil (the recipe suggests 40g but when I make it again, I'll probably reduce that to 30.) As suggested, I sprinkled the top with coarse sea salt right before it went into the Dutch Oven.

I wish I had worked it to get a bit more of a domed shape -- but all told, I'm happy. This bread is good eating!

Rob