FWSY Overnight White, with a few tweaks

I had been informed that a crusty, French-style bread was required for today's brunch with my cousins.  So, like any good husband possessed of a healthy measure of spousal love and self-preservation,  I set to work.

Forkish's Flour Water Salt Yeast caught my eye as I perused my bread books.  It has been quite some time since I last baked anything from it but I took the time to thumb through it again.  The Overnight White bread appealed to me.  It features a long, room temperature ferment; using less than a gram of yeast for a kilogram of flour.  That played well with my schedule, allowing me to bake the bread in the morning without having to get up early to start the dough.  It also creates a depth of flavor that isn’t available with a shorter ferment.

But…I wanted something more.  So I steered it in the direction of a pain de campagne by using 10% whole wheat flour and 5% whole rye flour instead of using all white flour.  I think that made the dough slightly more manageable (hydration is just shy of 80%).  It was still quite sticky, even after the recommended stretching and folding.

I followed the process given in the formula for autolyse, mixing, and stretching/folding.  Since our room temperature is still less than 70F, I fermented the dough in my proofer at 72F.  Some nine hours after the last stretch and fold, the dough had expanded to 2.5 times its original volume which is what Mr. Forkish recommended.  

The dough was divided, shaped, placed in brotformen seam-side down, and fermented.  The final fermentation was quite brisk, taking just under an hour for the loaves to be ready to bake.  

My only deviation from the process instructions was to bake the loaves on a sheet pan in a steamed oven instead of baking them in Dutch ovens.  The loaves had good oven spring and browned up nicely.  After 40 minutes at 475F, their internal temperature was 205F, so I removed them from the oven.

On the cooling rack, they sang loudly as they cooled.

The crumb is tender and moist, the crust crisp.  The flavor is just what I hoped for, with grainy notes joining the toasty/nutty notes from the crust.  It received an enthusiastic thumbs up from all of us.

While Forkish has, deservedly, taken flak for some of his views, this is a good bread and fairly approachable.  Yes, you have to be comfortable wrangling a fairly wet dough but the results are certainly worth the effort.  I should spend some time with other breads from this book.

Paul