A Semolina Loaf
I made the Semolina Bread on page 129 of How to Make Bread by Emmanuel Hadjiandreou. As you can tell, it did not turn out like the photos in the book. Not the shape nor the crumb. But it is a light, soft and good bread.
I did make a ring of the dough. Just not big enough. I suppose I should have allowed additional time for the dough to relax a bit more and then stretched it some more.
The crumb. I'm not sure what went wrong. Some of it is dense and yet there are the occasional large holes. Could this be related to the shaping? I followed the author's suggestion and used a pan of water for the steam. The bread was baked on a pre-heated stone.
Normally I use pans. This time I got a bit adventurous and tried something different. I appreciate all suggestions on how to make it better next time.
Mike
The large holes may be the result of insufficient degassing when shaping, but the density of other sections are more likely to be incorrect proofing.
A tip for the hole in the center: you can also stick a cup or small bowl inside the hole to help maintain the shape with proofing. You may want to spray it with oil so it doesn't stick to the dough, so that it's easy to remove right before baking.
But making it bigger is probably a good idea, too. I don't know how much your dough expands in the oven, so even with some help during the proof, it could still close up during baking.
doesn't knead the dough. It folds the dough repeatedly. There is a ten minute wait between folds. I found the dough to be resistant to stretching. I'm not sure how much degassing I should be doing during the folds. The hole in the middle was about two inches or more across when this went into the oven. It rose quite a bit.
About the recipe. It uses white sourdough starter with the semolina flour (Bob's Red Mill) and a bit of yeast and bread flour (KAF's). It's a single day bread so I may try it again to see if I can do it better.