Using day old flour/water mixtures
Hi everyone,
I'm a newbie here, so I hope I've posted in the right forum. I've had suboptimal results making US bread recipes with my local (German) flours, probably because the local flour is from soft wheat (vs US flour from hard wheat). I decided to use the slurry test to get a feel for what factors I need to adjust when I adapt a US recipe and how big those adjustments should be. I'm also planning to use the slurry test to experiment with additives like diastatic malt.
With the slurry test, I will be mixing different flour/water slurries and observing them for up to 24 h. Each slurry is going to use 100 g flour, and I'll probably compare several slurries at a time. I hate to waste.
I'm thinking to take the slurries and make bread with them after the 24 h are up. All of the flour and water in the bread would be from the slurries. I would just add yeast, salt, etc. to get to a simple bread. Will that work? Will I need to adjust how I work the dough?
Thanks in advance for any help!
Hi! It is good that you asked!
If you do the first 2 tests (at 30 min and at 60 min) at room temperature and immediately refrigerate your samples for 24 hrs to do the 24 hr test on refrigerated and quickly warmed up dough, then yes, it is safe to use those samples in bread dough.
Otherwise no, in 24hrs at room temperature bad microflora will proliferate and spoil your bread. Many of your samples would be so contaminated, they will explode, puff up, triple or quadruple in volume due to gassing bacteria, stink, etc.
Classic no-knead bread dough can sit up to 18hrs at room temperature, but it has both yeast and salt which suppress the rot, so it is safe to bake it and eat it. But a plain mixture of water and flour, nope, it is not safe.
Will you need to adjust anything? It depends. The article that you linked says to shorten the fermentation time and to reduce water if you discover a particularly weak flour with very low gluten content. You would be able to use those samples in liquid dough, by adding eggs, salt, yeast, etc. for baking pancakes or waffles, etc.
Medium strong and strong flours on the other hand will benefit from a prolonged cold autolysis that your samples will be subjected to. 80% hydration is very high, though, do you know how to make loaves from such loose and soft dough, from "slurries"?
This has not been my experience, although most of my efforts were with a dough consistency rather than a slurry, so that might make some difference. In my experience, the longer a flour mixture has been hydrated, the better the bread tastes, even if the dough has not been leavened.
I can no longer remember if I included salt in these unleavened doughs, but almost certainly I did. I would eventually combine them with the starter. In essence, the unleavened dough amounted to a soaker, even though it was usually white flour rather than whole grain, oats, etc.
Still, I have used 100% hydration from time to time but that's not really a slurry. So better safe than sorry, I suppose.
When you make your starter from scratch, does it not show any signs of activity in the first 24hrs?
Abe fairly recently did it with white flour and water, and it rose immediately, due to non-sourdough bacteria of course. Whole grain flours are even "dirtier", containing hundreds and thousands times more soil bacteria (e.coli among them) on bran particles.
Some produce spores which survive baking and then propagate in baked bread and make bread inedible soon after baking.
If you bake with North American wheat flours of course long hydration is beneficial to them, they are strong high gluten flours that absorb water very well and never release it back. They become drier, stronger, and easier to handle as they autolyze and ferment.
But European wheats, including German wheats, are different, their bread flour contains only 10% protein and its quality is sometimes so poor, due to weather and soil conditions, that they release water as they sit and ferment or are being autolyzed.
I think 10% protein in German flour is some kind of a myth. I've bought both Swiss and German flours for bread baking, and they are easily 12 or 13% protein. High extraction flour can be even 14%.
Arguably I am more familiar with Swiss than German flour, but still - I have been surprised by how strong it is despite the reputation of being "weak" relative to NA flour.
when comparing protein content of flours is that the US basis includes 14% moisture in the flour, where most European countries base the measurement on flour with 0% moisture.
Example: A US flour sample of 100g that contains 10% protein would have 10g of protein. That same flour sample, if dried to 0% moisture, would weigh 86g. It would still have 10g of protein but would be reported to have 10/86x100 = 11.6% protein.
The above approach is purely mathematical. It does not account for any chemical differences in the proteins that combine to form gluten that may exist between a wheat variety grown in the US and a wheat variety grown in Europe.
Paul
When you make your starter from scratch, does it not show any signs of activity in the first 24hrs?
Not really, no. Of course, in the past I've mainly used white flour. I have seen that whole grain rye, for example, does get sour in 24 hours or less. Now I feel impelled to make a 100% hydration mix with whole wheat and see what happens.
after having moved there from the US. I needed to get acquainted with new (to me) flours and their characteristics, since they were behaving differently than the flours I was accustomed to in the US.
My approach, which you can read here, was slightly different. Instead of using one hydration level with several different flours, I used multiple hydration levels with a single flour blend. The results were useful enough that I didn't proceed to test other flours.
Your experiments will no doubt help you understand how best to adjust formulae to work with your local flours.
Paul