Pane Buratto (Mulino Marino)

Mulino Marino is (small) miller near Cuneo (Piemonte) that work hard to produce a high quality stone grounded organic flour. HERE the link to the web site where you can read more about the history, the products etc.

          

One of the most interesting thing is they use organic grains grown in Piemonte and Lombardia, just where I live. And the varieties of grains they mix are the best one for bread baking. For example Taylor and Bologna are hard/medium-hard wheat varieties that can be used in place of imported Canadian wheat. These and other national grain are mixed with care to produce a very good range of flours. All the flour is milled in pureness and contains no additional additives (milk and its derivatives, vitamins, preservatives, malt and its derivatives, etc).

The miller works also with ancient grains like Farro Monoccocum, Kamut, 8-row Maize, Buckwheat and Enkir.

                           

                           

The first time I heard about Mulino Marino was from a friend and just one week ago from a baker. So, wednesday I was in Milano center and I stopped at EatItaly store where I bought some flour.

There were a lot of flours but my choice was clear, I thought at the bread I want to bake and I picked up Buratto and Manitoba flours.

• Buratto is a medium strength wheat flour, stone milled, 80% extraction rate (Italian Type 1).
• Manitoba is a strong bread flour, cylinder milled, 72% extraction rate (Italian Type 0).

Here the sourdough bread mix I used for "Pane Buratto":

• 75% buratto + 25% manitoba (+ 0.5% malted barley flour)
• 25% pre-fermented flour (20% buratto and 80% manitoba)
• overall hydration 61%-62%, medium-soft dough

           [The loaf]                     [The crumb] Sorry, for the bad shaping and the tunnel, remove it with your imagination and look the crumb                                 texture around or fly into the tunnel and observe the translucent wall.           

The crumb is perfect: light but substantial, yieldind, moisty, soft and elastic. I made two loaves, one with stiff levain (50% hydration) and one with liquid levain (100% hydration). The stiff levain adds a touch (a very little note) of acetic acidity, I prefer the loaf with liquid levain.

The crust very good (for my oven and steaming apparatus). A good balance between chewy and fragrant.

The loaf shown a good oven spring and volume.

I can say Buratto flour is a perfect organic "all purpose" flour (tastier and rich of soluble fiber), not comparable with supermarket Italian flour. It's a pleasure to work with: after the autolyse I added the salt and in less than 2 minute of gentle hand mixing to incorporate the salt the dough shown a good gluten development.

The lesson for me is: use flour with extraction rate >= 80%, that is >= Italian Type 1. For sure I will test more flours from Mulino Marino ... Setaccio (a step over Buratto with a higher extraction rate, >= 85%) and SaporiAntichi (ancient grains mix) are my preferred.