Trying to improve my bread

Your crust looks good.  It has a nice even thickness all round and a good color.  I would hardly categorize it as 'thin' or 'flimsy'.  But it is difficult to tell from that small picture so I may be wrong.  Basically, the longer the bake the thicker the crust.   Does it soften up when it has cooled down?  If so, you haven't baked it long enough or your oven temp was too low.  How accurate is your oven?  Have you checked it lately? You said you baked it for 30 mins.  Why don't you try 35 and then leave it in for a further 5 with the oven off and the door slightly ajar.

Here is some advice I picked up from Mariana.  She reckons, to get your WW breads to rise higher, try autolysing the WW  component for 30 mins before you add the other ingredients.  The addition of some fat (the type that is solid at room temp. eg. butter, lard - not oil) will also improve them.  You don't need a lot (about 1 - 2% of your total flour weight).  She also says, it is really important to develop the gluten structure of WW breads at kneading.  I always give mine a good 15 minute knead by hand and try to get as close to passing the window pane test as possible.  3 stretch and folds at 30/60/90 mins should also improve both extensibility and elasticity.  You could also try and sieve some of the coarser bits of  bran out of the flour.  You will still have the same flavour of WW but sans the larger bits of bran which can pierce holes in the gluten structure and deflate the loaf.

What is the hydration of the recipe that you are using?  Some more details on the recipe would help with a diagnosis, too.  Handling is another crucial issue.  You  need to firm up that outer 'gluten cloak'  so that the loaf stands up nice and high but you don't want to lose too many of those fermentation bunbbles in the process.

You said that the loaf was 'elastic and rubbery'.  What was the protein percent of the flour you were using?  

You could try giving the loaf a longer final proof.  If it wasn't quite doubled as you say and your oven temp was too low, you wouldn't have got much oven spring.  I allow some of my yeasted loaves to more than treble in bulk before I bake them and then they still rise some in the oven.  Admittedly, these are usually loaves baked in forms but it does serve to illustrate that you can often prove loaves more than you think.

The dough pictured appears to have trebled, maybe even quadrupled, in volume during the first rise.  Consequently, it was riddled with bubbles.  If you had seen bubbles at the surface, it would have meant that the gluten was breaking down and allowing the gas trapped in the bubbles to escape.  For your own understanding, try slicing part way into the risen dough when you bake next time, prior to degassing.  You will see all kinds of bubbles throughout the dough.

The shape of a bowl makes it very difficult to gauge just how much expansion is occurring as a dough ferments.  Try putting the dough in a transparent or translucent container with vertical sidewalls during your next session.  Mark the position of the top of the dough with a piece of tape.  Then use another piece of tape positioned twice as far up the container so that you can see when it reaches the doubling point.  In other words, if the top of the dough is 5 units (inches, centimeters, whatever) from the bottom of the container when first placed, put another piece of tape 10 units up from the bottom of the container.  The key things are that the container has straight sides and that you can see the dough through container walls.  This will give you a much better way to see when the dough has doubled (and maybe let you see some of those bubbles, too).

I'd happily eat that bread, so don't be too hard on yourself.  The stuff that is labeled "Italian bread" in the U.S. usually has a soft crumb and crust.  If you are looking for something more "robust", you might want to switch to a pain de campagne.  Those often feature a hard crust and firm crumb.  They also (usually) only contain flour, water, yeast and salt.  The milk or oil that a lot of Italian bread recipes call for will soften both the crust and the crumb of the finished bread.

Paul

The crust was nice and hard fresh out of the oven but did soften tremendously as it cooled. When fully cooled the loaf looses the rigidity it had and feels more like a big sponge.

If you don't bake your loaf long enough, you won't drive enough of the water off.  As the loaf cools, the water migrates to the crust and softens it.  You need to bake your loaf for longer or increase the baking temp.

One more question, when determining the hydration %, is it necessary to include the water and flour that went into the start used (biga or poolish)?

 

Yes, if you want to work out the total hydration of the loaf, you must include all the flour and water.  It is going to be difficult to work out the hydration of your loaf accurately because you didn't weigh your ingredients, but I had a go at it anyway.

You had a total of 3.25 cups of water in your loaf.  That is about 760ml of water which equals 760g.  You had 7 cups of flour.  Now this is where the guessing comes in because depending on how you scooped/packed/leveled your flour in the cup measure, you could have anywhere from about 110g to 150g per cup.  let's say that you erred on the heavy side and your cups weighed in at 143g per cup.  That would give you a total flour weight of about 1000g.  Divide the total water by the total flour and you get your hydration:0.76 or 76%. 

I can't really comment on the addition of the vital gluten because I have never baked with it.  I have never felt it necessary and I bake with a flour which only has an 11.4% protein content.  I can't say with any certainty but it just may be contributing to what you describe as being 'elastic and rubbery'.  Perhaps others with more knowledge on the subject could comment on this.  Why don't you try halving the vital wheat gluten and see if that makes a difference. 

A word of caution:  don't try to change too many variables at once or you won't know which one was responsible for the final result.

...behaves better in bread when soaked ahead of time or used in the biga.  Even though your flour mix is only 30% whole wheat, I'd try using 1.25 cups of the 2 cups of whole wheat in the biga and use the 1.25 cups of white flour and the 0.75 cup remaining whole wheat in the final dough. 

You could instead, make a soaker with the 2 cups whole wheat, 0.75 cup of the water in the recipe (or slightly more) and 1 tsp of the salt from the recipe and let this sit out  covered overnight.

It's pretty easy to underbake loaves - crust color and crust firmness aren't at all good indicators of doneness, and even the old "thump" test of rapping the bottom turns out to be not very accurate. If the loave aren't fully baked, as the loaf cools the moisture from the crumb will migrate out through the crust (except some of the moisture won't make it all the way and will remain in the crust:-). The result will be a crust that seems fine initially but softens significantly while it's cooling.

Try getting a thermometer, maybe a "Thermapen" (if you can afford it) or at least some sort of 'Instant Read' thermometer. When you think the loaf is done, take it out of the oven and close the oven door and leave the oven on and put the loaf on your cooling rack. Then immediately poke the thermometer through the crust in some inconspicuous place into the very center of the crumb and measure the temperature. If it's not done yet, put the loaf back in the oven right away. If it is done, turn the oven off.

Sometimes the recipe will specify the desired temperature   ...but often not, so you have to figure it out yourself. Usually for typical lean doughs the rough rule of thumb is you want the internal temperature to be somewhere between 200F and 210F (my own personal experience is I need the full 210F, otherwise the crumb seems "mushy").

(Of course this needs to be adjusted if you live at a high elevation. The rule is really more like "12 to 2 degrees Fahrenheit less than boiling". But that's a mouthful and is overly complicated for the majority, so it's usually simplified to just 200F-210F with the [largely unspoken] assumption of "near sea level".)

If in doubt, err on the side of overbaking. A loaf that was in the oven five minutes too long might present a very slightly darker crust (or might even not present any visible difference at all). A loaf that was in the oven five minutes too short though will often have either a soft crust or a mushy crumb.

If you really want to modify (not just un-mushify) your crust, I suggest experimenting with either a small amount of uniformly fine water mist over the loaf before going into the oven or with "covering" the baking loaf with something like an inverted roasting pan (maybe a disposable foil one from your supermarket) for the first ten or fifteen minutes.

You can also experiment with raising the temperature and lowering the time (so the net bake is the same), or lowering the temperature and raising the time (again so the net bake is the same). You may be able to significantly affect crust color without affecting anything else.

P.S. If the bread is too "chewy" for your taste, and/or if all the bubbles always stay inside and never come to the surface, a strong suspect is flour with too high a gluten content. Often this is nothing more than switching down from some brand's "bread flour" to the same brand's "all purpose flour". Of course, buy the smallest quantity you can to initially bake just a couple test loaves to see whether you want a regular sized sack of the alternate flour you just tested.

Thank you so much.  Just exactly what I needed to know.  Pam