Combo Artisan Batard

By ‘combo’ I refer to using both yeast and sourdough starter as leaveners plus these couple of techniques mentioned below:

Salt-Stressed Yeast (Stress)

This is done by diluting the yeast and salt used in the recipe in water (8-10% brine) and letting it stand at RT for ~1 hour. Advantages of this technique can be found here for instance.

Double Flour Addition (Whisk)

Explanation of this technique devised by ‘SteveB’ can be found in his website breadcetera. It rests on a logical base and thought to include it here in my combo experiment. An additional gain of this technique comes from the fact that the sourdough starter gets thoroughly dispersed in the batter and so kneading of the final dough is kept to a minimum.

Sourdough

In place of sourwort or acidulated malt, this time I used sourdough. Few words though about this old acquaintance of mine. ‘Yoyo’ (bcs it goes up and down, that’s all it does!) was created spontaneously about 8-9 years ago and since then had its ups and downs figuratively and literally. Sometimes maintained with love and devotion (for a short period it was even fed every 6 hours round the clock) using the best of materials I could provide. Other times neglected letting it starve in the cold or mistreated by feeding it randomly with whatever leftovers happened to lie around. Most times using a scale to refresh it, fewer eyeballing it. But after each occasional abuse it kept coming back alive and strong, stubbornly refusing to depart. My last major abuse towards it was to park it in the freezer (-18C) a couple or so years ago and follow other endeavors in home baking (plus moving into a new place). Recently though, the frozen ‘mummy’ has awakened! Within a week or so of close attendance the mummy was resuscitated back to life becoming  a playful yoyo once again, an 100% rye starter now maintained like so:

Refreshed once a day with equal weights of water and whole rye flour, held at 18C|64-65F. Keeping it consistently at this temp (my wine cooler does an excellent job at that throughout the year) allows me to concentrate on the rhythm of the starter, having to worry only about the refresh rate (since everything else is held constant). So it’s been gradually tuned to fit into my life style instead of the other way round (both happy).

'Yoyo' just fed                                                                         Half way into its cycle

Now to bread making:

Total Formula

220g       flour (robin-hood wap p13.2%)

163g       water

20g         yoyo (~2/3rds into its cycle)

2.2g        rye malt (30° Lintner)

0.4g        instant dry yeast

4.8g        salt

+11g      drained wheat bran previously soaked overnight

Stress

50g water/all idy/all salt

Whisk

~60g flour/remaining water/all yoyo/all stress solution above

This batter was whisked inside the mixer bowl using a whisk attachment for 4-5min.

Round up

After whisking the remaining of the flour and bran were added and mixed with dough attachment just enough to combine all ingredients together (no kneading). Bulk followed for two and a half hours at 28-30C with coil folds in between. Then the dough was shaped, placed in banneton and retarded overnight at 4C. Baked next morning as usual.

This is what came out of all this: