100% whole stoneground red fife take five!
You may know my frustration with this grain and trying to learn to bake with it at 100%. With much advice and good helpful suggestions from many here, you know who you are so thank you, I think my fifth bake is the best so far without having seen the crumb.
So what changed with this bake? First was a drop in hydration from 80% to 75%. This really did seem drier than I am used to dealing with and now that I think I have the fermentation a bit better figured out, I think I would increase this back up. The dough was so NOT sticky that I didn’t really need to wet my hands to do the coil folds. I still did a fair number of slap and folds, but I didn’t do a lamination. The reason for this is that I was worried about the gluten and didn’t want to stress it by doing a lamination. Whether or not that was a good thing to leave out, who knows. I did four coil folds during bulk after an initial bench letterfold and ended bulk at only 40% rise in the aliquot jar. Other than for baguettes where I end bulk at 20%, this is the lowest I ever end bulk. But for this flour going to 50% was too far. Then the dough was shaped and left for 30 mins on the bench until the aliquot jar reached 45% and then placed in the fridge at 3ºC. After a few hours in the fridge I noticed that the dough had risen further which I’m not used to seeing in my cold retarded doughs. So after a short for me 8 hour cold retard I decided to bake. This is what came of all of this.
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