SJSD-ish with 125% hydration rye levain
On May 1st BreadBabies posted her SJSD batard twins. And they were lovely. But her post started off with a lament on her rye levain. After being built and "ready" her resultant bake yielded the comment "Hamelman's Vermont Sourdough was more like a Vermont pancake".
I suggested that her rye levain was the issue and that it was way past usefulness, having expired all of the yeast's food by the time she got around to employing it. It was in the throes of death at that point and therefore she shouldn't throw in the towel so soon on trying to use rye levains.
As her SJSD was so nice, I provided a bastardized version of it replacing David's 100% mixed flour liquid levain with a 125% all rye flour liquid levain. She replied along the lines of - after you. So be it. I guess that was the bee in my bonnet that I needed! And so BreadBabies - here it is:
One other point that I want to re-emphasize. Is once you / I / we make a mod to someone else's formula, it is no longer their formula that we are making, it is our own version, a one-off. And again, to me, a good thing.
First order of business is to know what a ripe and ready 125% rye levain should look like. Doubled in size from when it was fed, it started out at the horizontal "gelato" line. This took 5 1/2 hour in my 78dF kitchen:
Changes from David's SJSD formula for this run:
- the obvious switch to the 125% rye liquid levain
- incorporated the levain with the water and flour up front. Otherwise it would have been a little difficult to incorporate the post-autolyse levain by hand.
- Bulk rise with letter folds at 40, 80, 120 and 150 minutes. Then whisked into retard for ~16-18 hours.
- baked straight out of retard without a bench proof.
The dough was incredibly extensible throughout the letter folds. Soft and quite pliable for final shaping. With a modestly floured couche they released quite easily, with no sticking although they shed a fair amount of moisture onto the couche.
Baked at 480dF. Steamed for 13 minutes. Rotated and baked for an additional 10 minutes. Vented for 2 minutes more.
375g x 4 baguettes.
Crumb shot added. Preparing for my morning toast...
Comments
they look soooo good. Beautiful as always Alfanso.
Leslie
Really, they all are. As far as making "radical" changes to a formula - after a while one will generally have a fairly good sense of what the final product should be. Although there is always that small doubt until I can see it in action.
thanks, alan
Wow. A loaf created to help me solve my problems! Have I mentioned that this is the nicest place on the internet?!?! They look amazing! Definitely worth trying. Thanks!
is good for the gander. So if I'm postulating that someone else should do this or that but I hadn't done it myself, it's just a lot of smoke until then.
If you are still relatively new to home baking, this is where the fun starts. Following a formula to a "T" is a great jumping off place. But once you start heading "east" instead of following the road map, the sense of creativity and accomplishment starts to grow.
Give the Vermont SD another try, now that you know what to look for in your levain. It didn't get so many accolades from others for no reason. Although I've only made it twice myself, once with a bread flour levain and once with this one.
I neglected to mention that the second stage build was after it had been living in the refrigerator, where I usually keep extra on hand (hence the 1 qt. capacity container), was quite chilly for the refresh and probably hadn't been refreshed in a week or more.
alan
These look great as usual Professor Baguette! I do say I would rather have the Butter Pecan ice cream than the levain :)
So did you bulk retard the dough or the shaped baggies?
Happy Baking!
Ian
have always been chocolate and coffee. I'm a relative newcomer to the joyful flavor of butter pecan - only about 2 or 3 decades of it under my belt. Take that as literal as well as figurative ;-) . If you remained in Brooklyn long enough before transferring to the Island, then you may also remember local candy stores/luncheonettes, seemingly almost always on the corner. Often they had the green Breyer's Ice Cream signage above the storefront. My favorite flavor was coffee with chocolate sprinkles on a sugar cone. 13 cents, if I remember correctly.
As with all my retarded doughs, the bulk goes into the refrigerator for a "few" hours, after which I pull it and shape it. And then it goes back into retard again. So the answer is both. I will let the bulk sit in the refrigerator for anywhere from 2-10 hours before shaping. I've learned through experimenting that it doesn't really seem to matter at all how long it is in one form or the other as long as the total retard time hits somewhere in the target range.
thanks, alan
Lol I thought the same thing upon seeing that starter. I think at one point we had around 30 empty ones (all chocolate chocolate chip) and started using them form my youngest boys chemistry set so while you have a levain we got potassium hydroxide and salicylic acid in them. Great loaves as usual and btw I think I coaxed about as much Browning out of my oven this weekend as possible. Need to go electric !
as a too young dumb boy, I was playing around with my chemistry set when I lit the kitchen floor on fire. With my partner in crime Randy, we formed a two foot long bucket brigade from the sink to put it out pronto. Fortunately it was only the fumes from the phenolphthalein that were burning off. I'm pretty certain that I never told my mother. I mean, why open a vipers' nest when I could just clam up?
Those Talentis do make good storage containers for levains. I came across the larger quart size at a warehouse store, and it is just dandy for a decent sized levain build. On the downside, the gelato is too darn good to keep around!
The bake is, of course, stunning inside and out, and I am quite sure that it tastes wonderful. The thanks, however, are for that little tidbit that you so casually tossed out in the comments (I have learned to ALWAYS read the comments!) that you retard during bulk for a while, and also after shaping for a while ---- and that it seems to work out fine so long as you keep it within the overall general timing that works for your conditions for retarding.
WELL. Well. Well. Dayumn. THAT is a whole nifty approach that might be just what I need to be able to better handle higher hydration dough (cooled during bulk to make shaping easier --- cooled during proof to make scoring easier --- overall retard to allow more flavour / acid build and easier to fit in to my weird "schedule"). This is definitely on the list of things to try sooner rather than later...
Thanks again, and all best to you and yours. Keep baking happy!
Laurie
I figured out what I can get away with and still control the scheduling of events. The dough is more easily shaped when it has some chill, so that is my preference for that reason too.
As an example of how one can schedule activities, I did a 1st step build of my 75% hydration levain last evening and retarded it before sleep. At 9 AM did a 2nd build which was ready at 1 PM. At that point I could have just tossed the levain into the refrigerator for a later time today or tomorrow, pretty typical of how I do it.. Instead I went right for the mix. The dough is now retarding as a bulk. Before I go to sleep tonight I'll shape it and send it back to retard and then bake sometime late tomorrow morning or early afternoon. I could just as easily shape the dough in the morning and retard it at that point. The beauty of all of this is that I get to pick and choose when to do these things instead of the other way around.
And yes, I also bake directly out of retard without a bench proof. The stiffer, cooler dough is more handle-able that way. Doesn't seem to affect the outcome. But gives me way more freedom of scheduling.