An alternative white flour bread recipe using CLAS

I love baking with CLAS. Especially whole grain breads. Consistent good taste and excellent crumb. So much so that I stopped taking crumb shots!

Not so much with white flour, though. Still the excellent open crumb, but most often, using Rusbrot's recipes, the taste was lacking the compelling complex flavors one expects with a sourdough. Improvising on my own didn't yield significantly better results.

So I poked around the web. There are very few CLAS-based recipes out there. But I found this video from Алексей Савицкий,   Хлеб на закваске КМКЗ. Рецепты из пекарни.  "Alexey Savitsky, Sourdough bread KMKZ. Recipes from the bakery."

Unlike Andrey's recipes, which shun preferments for white flour, this one uses a 4-hour preferment (resembling a biga), then adds the CLAS and other ingredients, kneads, proofs, and bakes. I tried it and I love the results.

Rusbrot's influence is evident in the details under the video. Most of the text is copied word-for-word from Andrey's blog posts!

It's interesting to see how casually the baker "refreshes" her CLAS-in-a-jar, just minutes before using it. Doing that to my CLAS would destroy it - perhaps maintaining it is different when you're using it every day, and never refrigerating it?

If any Russian speakers see any errors in my translation of the recipe, please correct it. And if you hear anything of note in the video's dialog, please post it here.

The recipe as given is for three loaves.

Predough
-------------
Flour 910g
Fresh yeast 30g
Water 540g
Mixed and fernented for 4 hours apparently at room temperature

Dough
---------
Flour  370g
Salt 22g
CLAS 110g
Water 110g
Predough 1480g

Mix and knead (unspecified time), transfer to pans, proof 50 min. (temp unspecified), then convection bake 35 min at 180ºC (356ºF). (Note: baker added baking time after checking loaf...)

Dividing by three for a single-loaf, with instant yeast:

Predough
-------------
Flour 303g
Instant yeast 3.3g (1.5g at altitude)
Water 180g

Dough
---------
Flour  123g
Salt 7g
CLAS 36g
Water 36g
Predough 486g

Flour in CLAS makes up 3% of the total flour. The last three bakes I increased the CLAS amount to 5% (50g @ 150% hydration) and I like the taste even more. I proofed at 95ºF in a B&T.

CLAS is really well suited for bread machines, and this recipe fits the timing of "Quick" and/or "Gluten-Free" programs of some machines pretty well.

This is the most recent oven bake, done in a 9x5 Chicago Metallic pan and the excellent Walmart 32L radiant toaster oven, for 35 min. at 425º with steam. Wonderful crust!

And this is the last bread machine version, done in a Tfal Actibread using dough mode then 50 min. Bake Only Dark crust. The Actibread bakes at 380º, but has a thin sheet-aluminum breadpan so the browning isn't as even. Oven spring was excessive, even with only 3/8 tsp SAF yeast!

I've made this seven times now, four in ovens, three in bread machines, with consistently good results every time! Mouthfeel is particularly good in the oven version, which bakes hot.

I've been calling this Savitsky bread, named after the YT poster. Try it and tell us what you think.