Bread Flour with Emmer and Spelt

For those of you who are fans of emmer or spelt, the good news is that they make a great combination.  This is another variation on a bread originally posted by tpassin.  The dough is extremely easy to work with, and the flavor produced by the emmer and spelt was surprising and exceptional.

The evening before the day of mixing, I combined 60 g of starter, 80 g of emmer, 80 g of spelt, 160 g of bread flour, and 360 g of water.  The emmer and spelt came from Barton Springs, and the bread flour is King Arthur.  The preferment sat overnight at room temperature.

Yesterday morning I combined 312 g of emmer, 313 g of spelt, 625 g of bread flour, 700 g of the preferment, 686 g of water, and 30g of salt.  (I should add that the recipe calls for 650 g of preferment and 670 g of water, but I used more of each because of a chilly kitchen and low humidity.)  These are all of the final dough ingredients and were mixed to uniformity (i.e., no dry flour), but without any attempt to create gluten.

After thirty minutes of the dough sitting in a tub, I dumped the dough onto a counter and did 250 French folds (aka slap-and-folds).  Dough temperature was 72 F when I returned it to the tub.

After another forty-five minutes I did a stretch-and-fold.  Thereafter I did three more, which were spaced a little less than an hour apart.  The dough behaved nicely and felt better with each S&F.  Finally, after a bulk fermentation that lasted a shade less than five hours, I dumped the dough onto the countertop, lightly floured the surface, and used a bench scraper to divide the mass into two parts.

This dough does not seem to need a bench rest, and I immediately did a final shaping, put each loaf into a banneton, and put the bannetons (each in a plastic bag) into the refrigerator.

The loaves were in the refrigerator for a little over seventeen-and-a-half hours.  The boule went into a Dutch oven, and the batard was baked on a baking stone.  Both were baked at 450 F for 46 minutes.  The weights were 1219 g for the boule and 1192 g for the batard.

Here are the loaves.

We kept the batard and gave the boule to some friends (I will be interested in their opinion -- fingers crossed).