100% Whole Wheat Kamut with Raisin Yeast Water
This is my first venture into baking with Kamut in a while. In the past, I have found this flour challenging, as the gluten needs a lot of time to hydrate, and once hydrated it's a bit weak and very extensible. I adapted this recipe from AnnieT's Semolina Bread recipe here: http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/20044/semolina-bread#comment-138273 [1]
I am delighted with this bread: it has a very thin, very crisp, delicate crust, a moist, tender interior, and a nice clean gentle wheat flavor.
I was concerned about the possibility of the gluten breaking down so I chilled the autolyse immediately in hopes of preventing too much early yeast and enzymatic action during the autolyse. This worked really well.
Here's what I did:
Poolish/Pre-Ferment:
- 100 grams yeast water,
- 100 grams hard red whole wheat flour
Mix, leave covered on the counter overnight, refrigerate until needed.
Autolyse
- 1 cup chilled yeast water,
- 115 grams fine-milled hard red whole wheat flour, sifted, bran discarded
- 190 grams fine-milled (twice milled) Kamut flour, plus more to dust
Dough:
- All of the pre-ferment
- All of the autolyse
- 9 grams salt
- 2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
Method:
- Mix flour, yeast water, and oil together to make a soft, sticky dough. Add more water if the dough isn't soft. Put immediately in the fridge to soak (autolyse) overnight.
- Take dough out of fridge, combine with pre-ferment and salt, and knead for about 5 minutes, until smooth and elastic. Add a little warm water while kneading if needed. Gently round, place into a lightly oiled bowl and let rise in a warm location until ripe, about an hour and a half.
- Turn out, top down, onto a lightly floured surface. Slide your lightly-floured hands, palm down, under dough and lift and gently stretch the dough out, like a pizza dough. Lay the stretched dough down on counter and stretch the edges out too, into a square-ish shape. Press out any large air bubbles. Fold in thirds from the sides, and then again from the top and bottom (letter fold.)
- Place back in bowl, seam down, and let rise 20 minutes or so. Repeat step 3 and let rise again for 20 minutes.
- Preheat oven to 425. Shape dough into a batard. Let dough rise until visibly expanded, about a half hour. Don't let it get all the way to the very tender quivery, fully-inflated stage. Place in clay baker, brush off excess flour, score, spray heavily, cover, and place in oven.
- After 20 minutes, remove cover and bake another 20 minutes or so, until loaf is browning at edges and the internal temperature registers around 210 Fahrenheit.
Pictures show the hole the thermometer made, alas.