Hamelman's whole wheat levain
trying out my first loaf from hamelman's bread - whole wheat levain. Made some variations as I dont have a decent mixer and did 4 sets of stretch and folds within 2 hours and 15 minutes bulk rise. Added an autolyse of 1 hour too.
used 50% home milled whole wheat which the recipe called for on the finest setting on my komonfidibus 21. I think the taste would have been more developed if I had retarded the dough for final proof but since this is my first try of this recipe I thought I'd follow the recipe more closely.
i am still unable to get the nice bloom that I see so many breads posted here and wonder if my final shaping needs some serious work to get a tighter surface. Every time i turn the dough out from the banneton and score the dough, the dough spreads so any oven spring in the oven basically brings it back to the original volume as when the dough is in the banneton.
Comments
. under developed gluten ort my guess is that is is over proofed. Breads with more whole grains need to on the oven faster say at 85% proof rather than the 90% of whiter breads. Why i don't know but this is my experience.
The inside sure looks fine for a 50% whole wheat bread. Well done and happy baking
The crumb on those loaves looks great.
Also if you are having problems with spring, grigne, etc. on all your loaves - not just WW - make sure you have a lot of steam and evaluate your technique for getting the loaves into the oven without losing steam and heat.
That looks like a very good loaf, especially for a first attempt. If you retard next time I suspect you'll get better scoring and a better bloom.
I find that when I refrigerate my loaves for the final proofing, especially very high hydration doughs (75%-80%+), the scoring is always better, more pronounced ears, better grigne, and they bake up higher.
i think I can identify it to over proofing and insufficient steam. Will try making these adjustments