Thinking about open crumb

Every now and then I go after open lacy crumb in my breads. Now, I'll be first to admit that I love my bagels, flat-breads, whole-wheat and all rye breads too! So, a lot of the time I'm not interested in open crumb at all. But, the first time I made a sourdough bread that had a dark, almost-burnt crust, and a light interior that was like a "web of crumb" held up by the crust, it was a bit of an "aha" moment. So, that's what other bakers were going on about, it isn't only an Instagram thing!

Lately, I've had a couple of things on my mind when baking the sort of loaves for which open crumb becomes a consideration - both things revolve around getting loaves that are more well proofed.

The first has been about building the levain so that it is vigorous and more capable of expanding the loaf to a large size before becoming too acidic. And, pairing that with keeping the hydration low and using a vigorous machine mix. So, a dough that will be capable of inflating well, paired with a strong levain.

The other thing is something I guess we all think of - it is what Paul recently called "loaves (that) felt light for their size" and what I think of as loaves that have a light hand-eye feel! My batard bannetons normally take about 800-850g of dough, but I've found that I can reduce that to about 750g of dough and just extend final proof longer until the banneton is filled to the same volume as before. For this bake it was 768g dough per loaf.

For the levain build here, I had a lovely bubbly very liquid 166% hydration rye levain leftover from making Danish rye a couple of days before. With a '3' stage build we'd normally want a stiffer levain, so at about 10pm at night this was made into a ~80% hydration levain by using only 9g of the bubbly rye levain with 125g of bread flour and 100g of water. The next morning it was almost ready to use (kept in proofer at 26C), but wanted to give it another 'quick' feed before using and to bring the hydration to about 100%. This feed was an additional 30g flour and 50g water, the relatively small amount of flour meant that it wouldn't be necessary to wait for too long before baking, and the levain was nicely tripled before using. I still aspire to the more classical 'french 3 build levain' at a much lower hydration (say 50%, salted), but then I guess we'd be looking at say 1:6 for the overnight feed, whereas, by keeping it a little more liquid as was done here I could go a lot higher (this is about 1:13?). Don't know which way is better, a higher feed ratio or a stiffer levain or if they are even mutually exclusive, and I wonder what your thoughts are!

When it comes to the 'vigorous' mechanical mixing I've been back on the food processor bandwagon for a while now and my mixer has been taking a break. I'll be the first to admit that the food processor felt 'chaotic' for me at first. I had disasters and ruined my old food processor too! Nowadays, except for having to work with the 'scary' metal blade things go pretty smoothly. I do about a two minute mix starting on slow and adjusting the dough every now and then. Dough is mixed for one loaf at a time to stay within the capacity of my food processor as well as to mix better. Gluten development is marvelous and because it is so fast, the mixing and washing of the food processor bowl and blade can be done within 15 minutes, even for two loaves.

For this bake the fermentation was fairly long - 7 hours 40 minutes - and still could have been longer - with the proofer set at 26°C. That time is from initial mixing of the dough until it went into the fridge overnight. The dough started a little cool as 15°C water was used for the initial mix by hand, then it had a 40 minute 'fermentolyse' rest in the fridge before going into the food processor and came out of the food processor at 24°C.

Crumb was good, open but not as open as my previous bread. And, next bake I'll tweak and push it even further... maybe up the hydration a percent and reduce the amount of dough for each loaf a touch too. After all, it is a long journey to crumb nirvana. But not all at once -  the next loaf is going to be a whole-wheat loaf - so this will continue to be a slow interrupted journey in many stages.

-Jon