First Miche
I always have so many different types of bread I'd like to bake, but I can only eat so much in any given week. One style of bread I've been wanting to try for a few months is a miche, and now that I've gotten a handle on making my own 85% extraction flour, I decided now was the time to jump on it.
I didn't follow any one recipe for this, though I did use the BBA baking directions for reference since this mass of dough is twice what I usually bake. In the future I would preheat the oven to 450°F instead of 500°F, so that I can leave it in longer and get a darker, crispier crust.
My formula was pretty simple:
- 1000 g 85% extraction freshly milled hard red wheat
- 800 g water
- 100 g stiff starter (white, 57% hydration)
- 21 g salt
I doubled my typical leaven amount and didnt retard the proof because I wanted to get it all done yesterday.
The crust is slightly chewy. The crumb is tender and moist, with a hearty whole wheat flavor and a touch of sourdough tang. From everything I had read about miches I was honestly surprised at the height I got. The aspect ratio is obviously nowhere near what you'd get from a smaller batard, but it still impressed me.
PS: Does anyone know why I get so much extra whitespace before and after my photos on here? I'd like to just get the normal paragraph spacing.
Comments
Now that's a loaf anyone would be happy to bake! Or even just to see, it's so gorgeous. I hardly ever have bake one that large, for the same reasons as you.
As to the extra spaces between pictures, the only thing I've found is to insert one picture right after the one before, with no new spaces or line feeds. A useful tip is to add an extra new line before you insert a picture, so you will have a place to type something following the picture. Then go up a line before actually inserting the image. There is also a button to see the source code for the post. It seems to let you edit it as well. I haven't tried it yet but it would probably let one remove those extra blank lines.
Thanks Tom! I almost feel crazy saying I wish I had more mouths to feed so I could get through my bakes quicker.
I've definitely learned to pre-space my images so I can keep typing after them. As for the source code, my HTML is very basic and definitely doesn't cover parsing the image embed code, but I guess I can live with a few extra lines of space.
You managed to get a higher profile on yours than I usually see. That's a good looking loaf of bread.
Paul
Thanks, Paul!
Excellent bake. I just looked at my notes for the Poilane-style Miche (from Reinhart's BBA), which I've baked several times. The bake started at 450F for 25 minutes and then dropped to 425F for the remainder of the bake. Total baking time was 65-70 minutes, and each miche ended up with a crust similar to yours. You don't mention what your miche weighed, but mine generally were in the 1875-1900 gram range.
I wonder what difference it makes to do the Reinhart process of mixing the starter with flour and water the day before, letting it rise slightly, and then refrigerating it for use the next day as opposed to what you did with everything happening on the same day. In particular, I wonder about whether the taste is affected. Your oven spring, crust, crumb color, and general crumb density seem enough like what I produced that I can only imagine that any difference would show up in the taste.
One thing Reinhart mentions is that the bread will taste different each day and might taste the best two or three days after it comes out of the oven. I found that to be true. That is one saving grace in baking a loaf that weighs so much -- at least it is fine for a week.
Happy baking.
Ted
Hi, Ted. I didn't get the final total weight of the dough at shaping, but the total weight of ingredients was 1920g, and losses during mixing were minimal, so I expect it was close to 1900g.
Reinhart does say to bake at 450°F for the first 25 minutes, but he also preheats to 500°F. In my case, my oven is gas, so I can't have the oven on and use steam at the same time. I have a custom made 1/4" thick baking steel that fills my entire oven (so that I can bake four 950g bastards at the same time), and to steam the oven I plug the oven vent with towels, pour water in a cast iron skillet full of lava rocks, and turn off the oven for 15-20 minutes. The end result is that whatever I preheat to is essentially what I start baking at, due to the large thermal mass. I checked the internal temperature at 55 minutes and it was 208-210°F, so I didn't want to bake it any longer since it was already higher than Reinhart recommends.
The only thing Reinhart does the day before is prepare a levain; he's not doing an extended fermentolyse or anything, it's just 28% prefermented flour. I didn't follow that part of the directions both because I didn't want to bother my wife and newborn Saturday night by grinding wheat, and because I prefer to do longer bulk ferments rather than use a high percentage of levain. Basically, I just did was I know works for me to make sourdough bread, I just made it twice as big.
I haven't tasted it plain since Monday morning, maybe I'll check it out for breakfast today. I can confidently say that it won't be lasting a week, because we've eaten almost half of it in the first two days. Honestly, the flavor was fantastic 12 hours after baking, I'm not sure how it could get much better. It was pretty low in acidity, and I could see that intensifying over time.
For some mysterious reason my Miches taste better as they age over several days. What about the super-large round shapre does that?
Did yours?
It doesn't have to be a large round shape. I've made plenty of naturally-leavened, smaller loaves that also improved with age. I've wondered about the reason without really coming up with anything definite. It can't be enzymatic action, though, since baking temperatures would denature them. It seems to me that leaves acidity to work its chemical action over time.
Maybe someone else knows an actual fact about it...
TomP
Well, yes, it doesn't have to be a "miche". Anything with 80% of rye will taste better a few days later, and many rye recipes even forbid eating prior to at least a day to "cure". And for sure my loaf size 100% whole wheat desem changes over time. But I'd argue miches exaggerate the effect. I think you must correct that it has something to do with the acidity, though that is a vague answer.
I've always noticed that my sourdough (regardless of size) tends to get more sour as it ages, even after baking supposedly kills off all the bacteria. That's not really what I envisioned when I read that the miche is best at 2-3 days old, because I wouldn't say that more sour is universally better. I always assumed that the larger mass could retain moisture better and that this would at the very least delay any decline in quality. And if there's available moisture technically there are any number of non-enzymatic chemical reactions that could continue after baking, though I can't think of any that seem plausible.
In my personal opinion, my miche didn't taste better at 60 hours than it did at 12. It was a little more sour and a little less moist, neither of which were improvements. It was definitely still good, but I liked the fresh miche better.