100% Levain No-Handling Bread

I have always been intrigued by the hole structure visible through the sides of a starter container when the starter is well-developed. There is a wide range of hole sizes from very large to very small. Once the starter has been scooped out and mixed with the other dough ingredients, that structure is gone. Wouldn't it be interesting to capture it, bake that starter as is, freeze that foam as it were?

That's what I have done with this bake.  I mixed up the dough - which is really the same as the starter, so 100% levain - scraped it into a small loaf pan, and let it ferment for a long time.  Then I baked it right in its pan with no other handling.

The result astonished me.  The crumb had that hole structure that I hoped to capture.  It was delicate yet elastic, soft yet firm at the same time. The crust was thin and crackled when bitten without shedding many crumbs or flakes.  The flavor was wonderfully rich and even though the ferment was long (10 hours at 75 °F room temperature) any sourdough tang was so restrained that it blended into the overall taste without standing out on its own. This bread seems different from any other bread I have tasted in an ethereal, almost indescribable way. You are almost eating foam, but unlike so many commercial breads it is not at all like cotton or cardboard.

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The starter is my current pet formulation: 90% hydration, bread flour, 1% salt. This combination continues to rise for 10 - 12 hours after mixing, more than triples in size, exhibits large and varying hole structure, and after it peaks does not collapse and remains usable for many more hours.  I usually refresh once a day before bedtime and use it the next day in late morning or early afternoon.  For this bake the starter included 10% atta flour.  I think this makes for a richer flavor without affecting the other properties.  I also have been adding a small amount of rye bran.  Neither are necessary but I like the combination.  The rye bran stiffens up the starter a little and may add a little extra lactic acid bacteria.  I have a lot of rye bran left over from sifting it out from some stone-ground rye flour earlier this year.

The dough is the same mix as the starter except for having 2% salt instead of 1%. It's sticky and paste-like. I wanted to use a small loaf pan for this first experiment, in case the dough couldn't support the full height of a 4X4 Pullman pan. So I used my 3 X 3 X 8.5 inch small one. Typically I would use 450g of flour to fill the larger pan. The smaller one has about half the volume. I used 300g of flour, and divided it so that the dough filled up the pan to about 1/3 height, and the rest served as my starter refreshment.

I let the dough ferment in the Pullman pan for 10 hours.  It had risen to just a hair below the top of the pan, and the plastic wrap covering it stuck in places.  The wrap was hard to get off without tearing up the top of the dough but I managed.  Next time I should spray the wrap.

I preheated the oven to 450°F and and reduced to 425°F for the bake. I baked the loaf without the lid on the Pullman pan. At 35 minutes the interior of the loaf had gotten to 208°F and I ended the bake. The color could have used some improvement, and the next time I will apply an egg wash to the top and bake the loaf outside the pan for a few more minutes.

As for oven spring, I didn't expect much since the dough was already so expanded. In the end the loaf rose a little above the top of the pan.  Since the bread held up during baking, I'm planning to try a larger pan next time.  I could also have fermented it even longer which would have given even larger pores.

How is this bread different from a typical no-knead bread? Zero-handling, that's how. For a typical no-knead dough you mix up a wet dough (never with such a high hydration), refrigerate it, cut off a hunk when you want to bake, and shape it. With this bread you mix the dough and plop it into the pan, just like a quick bread.

I will admit that my enthusiasm is based on sampling it too soon after baking, only 1 1/2 hours.  A small loaf like this will cool down quicker than a larger one but this one still felt a little delicate.  So it's possible that the crumb might seem less ethereal later on.  It's been a fascinating experiment even if that happens.