Middlings Bread

The blog title is actually short for "Middlings Levain Bread", but it's a bit of a mouthful - read on....

I'm always on the lookout for ways to add more wholegrain to my loaves without reducing loaf volume and crumb tenderness too much. I have tried sift and scald but never been too happy with the result - the scald seems to make the bran tougher to me. I've also tried sifting and reducing the particle size of the bran fraction the bran fraction in a spice grinder to reduce particle size. This is quite effective, but rather messy.

And then there is the bran ferment/levain idea, which has been used by several TFL members in the past. This is the method I focussed on in this bake.

In this bake I decided to have 25% freshly milled wholegrain content - 15% heritage wheat + 7.5% spelt + 2.5% rye. I separated the coarse bran in a coarse kitchen sieve and gave it an overnight salted cold soak. I kept this bran separate because I didn't want the levain to get too acidic; also the bran can be added to the dough later on low speed, after gluten development, so it doesn't cut the gluten strands.

Then I sifted what was left through a #50 sieve. The pass-through went into the main dough flour and the retentate (the middlings) went into the levain.

I read a scientific paper on bran pretreatment by fermentation and it said they work best with added alpha amylase and xylanase to chop up the xylans in the bran. The alpha amylase I could get from diastatic malt flour, but the xylanase is not something you can buy too easily. Fortunately I found that a commodity bread flour in the UK called Allinsons contains added hemicellulase. Xylanase is part of the hemicellulase family, so this was as close as I could easily get. So I added a good amount of this flour to the levain as well.

The first couple of times I tried this method I used 30% levain, but fermentation was just too fast and the retarded loaves were overproofed - the freshly milled middlings must be the cause. So this time I cut the levain down to 20%

Autolyse was 30 minutes and bulk was 3hrs 15m to a 33% rise. More details can be found in my attached bread log. I called it Gerard Middlings Loaves because it has the same ratio of wholegrain wheat, spelt and rye that Gerard Rubaud used.

This time loft, ears and crumb were good - no overproofing. Loaf height for my standard batard was 96mm, which I consider to be very good for 25% wholegrain. Also the method seems to give a soft crumb that stays moist and keeps well. 

Lance