February 22, 2019 - 8:27am
Poolish with whole wheat timing
I am interested in making a yeast bread using a polish with whole wheat flour, the remainder of the flour being KA AP. On my first attempt, I think I let the polish go too long--13 hours at room temperature (around 62-65 degrees F). Is that too long? I know I should watch the preferment and not the clock, but it was overnight, and I really don't know what it should look like, other than bubbly.
Thank you so much for your so very kind help to a newbie!
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I think you're right. Whole grain works faster than white, too.
Thank you. I will try a shorter time, maybe 6 hours.
Your post raises a question I've had recently in looking to work up a substantially ww yeasted bread that I can make during short-ish visits at Airbnbs & VRBOs. I've had pretty good success with an up-ww version of Ken Forkish's "Harvest" Bread. Just this week I was looking at Hammelman's yeasted "Whole-Wheat Bread" as an alternative. Thing is, both authors call for prefermenting only the white flour and none of the ww. That seems like missing the opportunity to soften the bran and grit of the ww as much as would be possible were it all or partially included in the preferment. Makes me wonder why these knowledgeable bakers don't call for that. And makes me want to experiment with it, or look back through my records and see if I've already done those experiments ?.
My gut instinct is that, as long as you're not living in the tropics, it's hard to over-ferment a poolish. 13 hrs @ 62-65˚F shouldn't be dangerously too long.
Tom
Believe him, not me.
Thank you, all. Tom, my thinking is the same as yours--I am making one pan loaf, 1/3 WW and the rest KA AP. I wanted to give the WW more time to soften the hard bits, thus using the WW as the poolish. (I just noticed that auto-correct changed that word to polish in my original post--no polish in my recipe!)
Guess this is going to be a try until it works. I live in the triangle region of North Carolina (USA), so we can go from artic to tropical in 24 hours this time of year.
Well, the story says that "poolish" did apparently refer to this being a method that French bakers thought Polish bakers used. Whether that's actually true or not is probably impossible to find out, but it's the story. ?
("Poolish" makes no sense in French spelling, "polonais" and "polonaise" are the French words for Polish, and "pouliche" is a filly [in the classification of horses]* - so who knows.)
*(And the French word "fille", which looks like "filly", means "daughter" [a human one, not a horse category]. Yay for messy borrowing from one language to another! ?)