Ruchbrot
Happy New Year everyone. I'm back in Switzerland after holidays and baked my first bread with the local Ruchmehl flour - a Swiss version of high extraction flour. I followed a very simple recipe from https://www.homebaking.at/ruchbrot/ [1]
It includes a white flour levain build over a few hours and then exclusively Ruchmehl in the main dough, with high hydration (80%). The main flour is autolysed for 3 hours before mixing in the salt and levain as well. After just a little hand kneading using just firm folding and Rubaud-style the dough was well developed, and a couple more stretch and folds later made a strong, although stretchy dough. After bulk the dough was preshaped and then final shaped. I proofed in a floured towel in a tray placed on the balcony overnight, with night temperature going down to 4°C - just like in the fridge.
Baked with steam on a tray at 230°C. I discovered the oven here has a special mode for "humid baking" - it doesn't let out steam this way (audibly noticeable that the fan doesn't come on, unlike the regular baking mode even without convection), and it's the recommended setting for baking bread. So I used that, and seemed to work. While the shaping wasn't very tight and in proofing the bread spread out quite a bit lengthwise, oven spring was really good, however the slash didn't open very nicely. Maybe I didn't have to score it at all? Interesting.
The crumb is amazingly open, custardy, soft and a little moist - just like in the pictures on the recipe page! It's very tasty, without very strong wheaty/grassy notes like in whole grain bread, but very flavourful.
[3]
Overall, very happy with this bake, and pleasantly surprised with the flour!
And just now after baking noticed that there is an English version of the recipe available, and I didn't have to resort to Google translate :)