Stumbled across a new way of making one of my baseline SD loafs which led to a really nice result following an involuntary fridge retardation of the preferment.
After doing a 1:2:2 refresh of my 40g 100% hydration SD starter (which lives in the fridge), I took away 40g of refreshed starter to put back in the fridge and kept the remaining 160g as a preferment for the new loaf, which would be 25% wholemeal wheat and the remainder AP. So, 20% PFF (AP) from the total of 400g for the loaf (25% WW, 75% AP).
Left the preferment overnight to double, as normal, and did an overnight autolyse with salt of the WW (100g) with 100g water, planning to mix-up the final dough in the morning.
The next day I was not able to proceed with the final dough due to work, so just put the preferment and autolysing wholemeal into the fridge and left both there till the next day.
The morning after I took both the preferment and autolysing wholemeal out to warm and once they were up to room temperature and the preferment was nice and bubbly again, I mixed up the final dough (400g total flour, 70% hydration) and proceeded as normal with the BF and stretch and folds.
The BF dough developed nicely and grew quickly. In about 4h it was ready for proving. Very nice handling throughout and proving was again pretty fast; round about an hour). Held form really well, making scoring and transfer to the DO nice and easy. Baked at 220C for 20min lid on 15 lid off.
The loaf came out really nice. Lovely aroma during baking, great oven spring, great crunchy crust, and really nice and soft crumb. Lovely flavor to the bread too.
Having made this loaf in the past with a fridge retardation at the proving stage, I have to say that this version, with the preferment fridge retardation, was much nicer, both in term of flavor and texture. I have not done a cold retarding of the BF with this bake, so cannot say if that would be comparable, but it seems much easier to find space in the fridge for the preferment and it has plenty of convenience benefits if one has to break off from a bake between preferment and BF stages.
Will be trying this again in a more controlled way to see what more might be learned. I haven't come across fridge retardation of preferments, hence why I thought it might be worth a post.
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But I'm glad I did now. That's an interesting approach, especially as it shows how flexible our bread-making processes can be. Thanks for sharing your experience. I look forward to hearing about your next trial with this approach.
Paul
I also missed this one, and glad I found it. Thank you for the interesting read.
Lately, I've been fond of the salted cold autolyse, primarily because it lets the gluten develop naturally. For me, the downside of this is that it takes a while to warm up to room temp, so could add an extra 3 or 4 hours to the process. I like your idea of doing it with a high PFF (mine is normally half of what you had here).
-Jon