La Tabatière du Jura Sourdough Bread
There is nothing fancy about the recipe for this bread, but its shape is definitely one to remember. French bakers are very creative with how their loaves look like. La Tabatiere is a French regional bread from the East of the country. There are dozens of French regional and traditional varieties of bread. One is more beautiful than the other although some of them are probably less practical to cut and eat. I am tempted to try more French bread shapes in the future but for the moment let's look at this one.
This is a classic 65% hydration loaf. The hydration needs to be kept low so it makes it easy to create the specific shape. Usually, this type of bread is baked either only from bread flour or, with some inclusions of rye or whole wheat flour. Also, very common is to make this bread with yeast or with sourdough+yeast to speed up the process.
Ingredients:
- 765g strong wheat flour (14% proteins)
- 100g whole rye flour
- 532g water (lukewarm)
- 175g sourdough starter (100% hydration)
- 20g salt
For the method, this is a loaf to do in one day. Bulk fermentation at desired dough temperature 26ºC for 8 hours. I shaped the dough when it reached a 100% increase. I did a final fermentation of 1 hour and my dough had 125% volume increase before the baking.
The challenge of this bread is to get the flap to rise nicely in the oven. First of all, the flap doesn't have to stick to the main dough and that's why I brushed it with oil on the borders. Also, I found that retarding the loaves in the fridge doesn't help with this either. The flap doesn't have to be stretch very thin otherwise it doesn't rise but behaves more like skin.
For the scoring, well there is no scoring... it is rather scratching, otherwise the dough opens through the little decorations instead of rising the flap. The dough opens itself at the base of the flap as there is the weakest point.
Here I have the full making video of this bread: