Whole-rye & spelt sourdough
Made two 1.5lb loaves of sourdough with whole-rye and spelt flour. I retarded the shaped loaves for close to 24hrs, then gave it a 2-hr warmup before baking.
Based on the hole structure it looks like I could've given it another hour of proofing at room temp, but I honestly prefer a tight crumb for everyday bread. The taste is great, mildly sour and full of nuttiness & complexity from the spelt and rye. I think next time I will also retard the mature levain overnight before mixing the final dough and see what that does to the acidity. At that point I will be up to a 4-day bake cycle from initial feeding of the refridgerated starter to pulling the final loaves from the oven!
Overall formula (using 20% pre-fermented flour):
40% KA AP flour
40% KA Bread flour
10% HM Whole-rye flour
10% BRM Spelt flour
65% Water
2% Salt
That is most definetely on my list! Beautiful. Oh wait, I don't know how to figure that formula. That's what I get for not learning the math. Maybe I'll be forced to learn now.
Great job, looks delicious! weavershouse
Hi weavershouse,
Thanks!
If you want to try out the formula, you could probably just wing it. It's essentially Vermont Sourdough, with some of the wheat flour replaced by spelt, and a larger proportion of levain.
I computed the weights to give me exact percentages, but only because I am interested in systematically learning about the effects of some of these changes. But even then, I didn't do any of the math myself. Yesterday I posted an excel spreadsheet that will give you the necessary weights if you punch in the desired percentages. In fact, the above formula is included in the spreadsheet as an example. But like I said, you could probably do just as well (or better) just by approximating.
-Chris
I'm going to go now and take a look. weavershouse
that I wouldn't even care how it tasted, I'd keep it around to look at just because it's so pretty. The slashing is lovely.
Well done. --Mini Oven
One thing I noticed is that the slashing was unusually painless for this batch. I use the green plastic lame from KAF, and most of the time find that it drags much more and leaves me with somewhat ragged edges. This time around the blade sailed right through.
I don't really have a good explanation, but my theory at this point is that now it's summer, and my apartment is hotter and much more humid; So when I took the retarded dough out of the fridge and let it sit out a couple hours, it built up a lot of condensation on the outside. I think maybe either just the wetness of the surface helped the blade, or the prolonged wetness somehow changed the outer surface of the dough. Not really sure...
In any case, I am pretty happy with how this bread turned out. I certainly wouldn't line up the large majority of my loaves for portraits!
- Chris