Attempt at Lance's middlings preferment loaf

Finally found some Allinson's strong white and gave Lance's Middlings technique a go. 

The flours at my disposal were a bit more limited that those used by Lance, but decided to go with 120g of a really nice wholemeal wheat flour from a 17C still functioning windmill in the East Midlands (see photo), 30g of commercial wholemeal rye, 150g AP, plus the prefermented flour, which consisted of 80g AP and 20g of the Allinson's strong white which contains the hemicellulase. Total flour was 400g. Total hydration around 70%.

Managed to use different sieves to separate out the bran (6g) and the middlings (5g). The bran was soaked overnight with 4g salt and 20g water. The middlings were added to the preferment, which was built from 40g of liquid starter with a total of 100g of prefermented flour (80g AP & 20 Allinson's strong white) and 80g water.

It was very impressive how much faster and stronger this preferment was from my usual preferment without the middlings and the strong white with hemicellulase. It almost quadrupled in about a 3rd of the time my usual preferment took to double.

I usually leave my preferment overnight to mix into the BF in the morning, but this one with the middlings and hemicellulase was so fast, I had to put it into the fridge before going to bed to use in the morning for the BF.

The preferment was a little less vigorous in the morning after the refrigeration, so the BF proceeded with speeds closer to my bakes with my usual preferment, but the dough was very easy and nice to handle and once up to temperature gathered some momentum.

Shaping was very easy and oven spring, crust, and crumb came out really nice as can be seen in the photo.

For a 37.5% wholemeal bread, this is very light, moist, and airy loaf with a nice crisp and not too thick/heavy crust and a lovely very slightly tangy flavor. 

I will definitely be aiming to use this technique again and experiment further with it. For one, now that I know how fast the preferment moves, I will be doing it in the morning in order to avoid having to refrigerate it. My guess is that being able to go from preferment to BF directly, it would probably be possible to make a great SD loaf with high wholemeal content in one day using this technique. 

Will also like to see how high the wholmeal content can be pushed and still have a light and open crumb.