Less pain with my Levain

Since I began making Levain breads several weeks ago I've  wanted to try making the Roasted Garlic Levain from Jeffrey Hamelman's excellent book, but up until the last 3 or 4 Levain loaves I've made I just haven't had the kind of result I've been looking for. These naturally fermented doughs were and still are to some degree, completely new territory for me. The two stumbling blocks I kept running into were judging the bulk and final fermentation, since the dough doesn't behave quite the same as one made with bakers yeast , which I'm pretty familiar with. What was happening was the dough was splitting or blowing out during the last part of the bake. Verrry frustrating! However with a lot of reading and research as well as a couple of consults with Andy-ananda I think I'm finally getting a handle on it.

On the weekend my wife brought in a handful of fresh garlic and shallots from our garden so I decided there was no better time than now to make the roasted garlic levain. I used Jeffrey's formula as a guideline, sticking to the basic percentages of flour, salt, etc. but changed the percentage of levain down to 25% in the final mix as well as making a less stiff levain than what's called for, probably around 80% hydration Also I reduced the amount of garlic since our home grown variety is quite a bit stronger than what we normally buy at the grocer. Although the formula calls for a 1% addition of bakers yeast I think I could have left it out without any appreciable difference. Next time I will. This formula makes a beautiful dough that is very easy to work with even at the higher hydration that I mixed. It had a 2 hr ferment and about an 1.5 hr final rise, then the usual slash and steam. It yielded what I think are two very nice loaves, one at 800 grams and the other at 640 gr . What I really like about this bread is that the flavour is not heavy with garlic like some that I've had that are almost inedible if you value any sort of social life. Part of that may be because I used roasted shallots along with the garlic, but I tend to think it's because Mr. Hamelman formulated it so that the flavour of the bread itself would predominate. When I tasted it the first thing I thought of was how good this would be to use for bruschetta...and I was right! It grills/toasts very nicely, and as the garlic is already in the bread you don't really need to rub any on as you normally would with bruschetta.  With our Canadian Thanksgiving coming up next month, the other thing I've been thinking of using it for is as a stuffing base for ' the bird '  which I think it'd do brilliantly. Roasted Garlic Levain is certainly a keeper for me and I'd recommend the recipe to anyone wanting to try a real garlic bread.

Franko