High hydration - flat bread
Hello my fellow bread bakers. Recently I started to raise hydration of my breads from 70% up to 85%. I always had a fear from dough becoming too sticky and impossible to handle, but after few tries it seems it has become manageable for me. I’m having great success and my breads are improving—crumb has regular air pockets, it is soft but still chewy.
However, I am having a challenge with wholegrain breads. I watched a lot of videos on how to final-shape the dough to achieve sufficient surface tension and I follow them thoroughly. Despite that in the end my full grained breads end up with pancake—like shape as in the picture bellow. I wander if there is a way to improve it so that bread would not be so flat.
This very tasty bread, baked on baking stone at 250C is made of rye starter, 60% of full spelt flour, 15% rye flour and 25% AP flour. Hydration is 80%. In 4h bulk fermentation (at room temperature) I did 6 stretch&folds. Dough was quite sticky but still manageable. Final proofing time was 3h in which the dough raised for 1/3 - so it is definitely not over proofed.
If anyone can give me some advice or guidance on this I would deeply appreciate it.
Love, Tomas
PS. Happy New Year everyone :)
.. is the wholewheat "cutting" the gluten strands and thus reducing the glutens ability to hold it all together. Saying that, I can free-form my 100% wholemeal breads, but only yeasted (even overnight yeasted with only 0.5% yeast) but not long-ferment sourdoughs. (I've never been entirely convinced about this cutting thing, but something is definitely different with wholemeal - possibly less overall gluten in th flour as some is displaced by the weight of the bran)
Spelt "flows" - I don't know what it is with spelt, but I've never had good results free-forming it and always use a banneton. Try dropping the spelt for a test bake - substitute it with regular whatever. I've found white spelt helps, but it still flows.
-Gordon