Wednesday (night's) bake: white on rice (hard white whole wheat and rice flour)
Howdy everyone. So I'll start out by saying I wasn't entirely happy with this bake, and I used both rice flour and hard white whole wheat, both of which (to my understanding) have lower gluten forming abilities, though I may be incorrect on that. My problems began by missing a feeding of the mother the day before and so it was less active then it should have been, then the dough fermented and rose at a slower pace than usual, when I turned it out onto the board it was smaller then it should be and so I preshaped it and gave it an extra hour board rest, and finally because my timing was off for the start time (and the whole day), I ended up choosing to cold retard for only 5 hours and bake last night instead of this morning.....and after all that it still seems over fermented or shaped incorrectly, as there is a presence of large holes near the top and the oven rise was less then desired.
All that said it still tastes nice and my goal was to achieve a more shattery thin crust such as I enjoyed with some banh mi sandwiches at a restaurant last week. It is my understanding that this crust is achieved with the addition of rice flour and so I decided to do a little experimenting, and the crust did seem to be headed in the right direction so i'll play around with this some more.
As this loaf is still in the works I won't get too technical on the formula: mixed, autolyzed, s+fs (x4) at 20m, rise 2hrs, pre-shaped n rested 1.5 hrs (usually 30m) shaped, cold retarded 5hrs (usually 10-12) baked 450, 20min covered, 20 min uncovered.
whole wheat flour (hard white) 22.75%
white rice flour 14.75%
bread flour 62.5%
levain 20%
hydration 85%
salt 2.75%
Comments
Rice flour has almost no gluten in it so you need to take that into consideration. Your loaf looks pretty good to me. I have only used rice flour to prevent my dough from sticking in my baskets. Did you find it added any texture of flavor to the bread?
It's hard to say definitively but the slices (when toasted) do seem to have a more crisp and shattery crust. The crumb itself doesn't seem much different though. Tastes good, I wouldn't say any different though. Perhaps using brown rice flour, which I may try next time. I'll be playing with this recipe again next week. Glutinous rice flour exists (used for making mochi) so I may try to use that as well.