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In the ever-constant quest for a sandwich bread my picky 7 year old will eat, I search and try a lot of breads.  Yesterday I came upon Farmhouse White from A Year in Bread blog.  It sounded good to me, so I entered the info into my sourdough converter (first time using it) that I downloaded from Mike on SourdoughHome.com. I made smaller loaves and ended up with 4 so, so oh darn I made that one cinnimon swirl bread.  My starter is 100% hydration started and I put in about one cup of whole wheat flour and then 5 tsp of Vital wheat gluten since I was using Gold Medal AP Flour along with the C of WW.  I almost broke my Kitchenaid while mixing the dough and had to move to a stretch and fold form of kneading before bulk fermentation for a couple of hours.  I then shaped the loaves and covered them with a damp cloth in the fridge for a slow rise over night. 

So, I start the quest for a good, high-powered higher capacity dough mixer.  But, the bread turned out GREAT!

Most of the content is Susan's from the blog and all of the pictures are hers.  I have included hyperlinks to the 2 websites to which I refer.  Enjoy!

Susan's Farmhouse White Sandwich Bread - from A Year in Bread
Makes 3 loaves, approximately 1-1/2 pounds each

Ingredient US volume Metric Volume US weight Metric
organic all-purpose flour 4 cups - 940 ml - 1 lb, 4 ounces - 566 grams
instant yeast** 2 Tablespoons - 30 ml - 22 grams
granulated sugar 2 Tablespoons - 30 ml - 28 grams
canola oil 2 Tablespoons - 30 ml - 30 grams
warm milk (or water) 4 cups - 940 ml - 2 lbs - 908 grams
organic bread flour (approximately) 6 cups - 1,410 ml - 1 lb, 13-1/8 ounces - 825 grams
salt 1½ Tablespoons - 22 ml - 3/4 ounce - 22 grams

**To bake an even better loaf, you can reduce the amount of yeast to 1½ Tablespoons (or even 1 Tablespoon). This will make your dough rise more slowly, so you'll just need to increase the fermenting and proofing times. You can reduce the yeast in pretty much any bread recipe—a lot of bakers go by the formula 'half the yeast and double the rising time.'

MY Changes were: 

Mixing and fermentation

Autolyse
Autolyse (pronounced AUTO-lees and used as both a noun and a verb) is a French word that refers to a rest period given to dough during the kneading process. When making your dough, mix together only the water, yeast, flour, and grains until it forms a shaggy mass. Knead it for several minutes, and then cover the dough and let it rest for 20 minutes. (I simply leave the dough on the floured counter and put my wooden bowl over it.) During this time, the gluten will relax and the dough will absorb more water, smoothing itself out so that it is moist and easier to shape. After the autolyse, knead the dough for several more minutes, mixing in any other ingredients such as herbs or nuts or dried fruit.

In a very large bowl, stir together the all-purpose flour, yeast, and sugar (I use a wooden spoon). Make a small well in the middle of the flour mixture and pour in the canola oil and then the milk. Mix well, then continue to stir vigorously, slowly adding 1 cup of the bread flour at a time, until you've added about 5 cups, or until you have a soft, slightly sticky dough; this should take several minutes.

Turn the dough out onto a floured surface and knead for about 6 or 7 minutes, adding more flour as necessary to keep the dough from sticking to your hands or the work surface.

Place the mixing bowl over the dough, and let it rest for 20 minutes. This rest period is called the autolyse.



Remove the bowl, flatten out the dough with your hands, and sprinkle about half of the salt over it. Begin kneading the salt into the dough. After a few turns, sprinkle on the rest of the salt and continue to knead for 5 to 7 minutes, until the salt is completely incorporated and the dough is soft and smooth.

Sprinkle flour in the dough bowl, place the dough in it, liberally dust it with flour, and cover it with a damp tea towel (not terry cloth, as it will shed lint on your dough). Or put it in a straight sided plastic container with a snap-on lid and mark the spot on the container that the dough will reach when it has doubled in volume.

Set the dough somewhere that is preferably between 70°F and 75°F until it has doubled in size, about 60 to 75 minutes. Ideally, the dough should also be between 70°F and 75°F. It's fine if your dough is cooler; it'll just take longer to rise and will end up even tastier. It's easy to check the temperature of your dough and ingredients with an inexpensive instant read thermometer.

When the dough is ready to be shaped, you should be able to push a floured finger deep into it and leave an indentation that doesn't spring back. Unless your dough is rising in a straight-sided container, it can be difficult to judge whether it has "doubled in size" which is the guideline most recipes use. I find the finger poking method to be more reliable, though lately I've been letting all my doughs rise in plastic containers.

Shaping and final rise (proof)
Turn the risen dough out onto a lightly floured work surface, flattening gently with your hands to break up any large air bubbles. Divide the dough into three equal pieces.

Shape the dough into loaves and dust the tops with flour. There are dozens of ways to do this; for the way I like to do it, check out this post on how to shape dough into sandwich loaves. Place loaves seam side down in greased loaf pans. I like my sandwich breads to be tall, so I use smaller loaf pans. I can't say enough good things about these commercial loaf pans from Chicago Metallic. They call this size a 1-pound loaf pan, and it measures 8-1/2 inches x 4-1/2 inches and is just under 3 inches tall. For the price of a few loaves of bread, they're definitely worth the investment—and with a 25-year warranty. Chicago Metallic also makes this larger 1½ pound size pan for those of you who prefer a wider, shorter loaf.

Cover the loaves with a damp tea towel and let them rise for 45 to 60 minutes. When you lightly poke the dough with a floured finger it should spring back just a little.

If you let the loaves rise too long, they may not have enough energy left to rise once they're in the oven--and they may even collapse. I was always so afraid this would happen that for years I unknowingly under-proofed my loaves of Farmhouse White.



While the bread was still delicious, you can see that the dough had so much 'oven spring' that it basically blew apart the side of the loaf. I finally started letting the loaves rise a little longer and was rewarded with the more evenly shaped and visually appealing bread that you see in the top two photos.

Bake at 375° for 35 minutes or until the loaves are golden brown and the bottoms sound hollow if tapped. Remove immediately from pans and let cool on a wire rack. Try to wait at least 40 minutes before cutting into a loaf. Store at room temperature or freeze in zipper freezer bags. Make sure loaves are completely cooled before sealing in bags.

Update: I've started baking all of my pan loaves on a heated baking stone (in order to simulate the ceramic hearth deck of my 7-foot wide commercial deck oven in the someday-bread-bakery-to-be), and the results have been wonderful. The bottoms of the loaves are nice and evenly brown, and I think that extra initial burst of heat makes the loaves end up even taller. Just like with pizzas and freeform loaves, you need to preheat your stone so that it's nice and hot when you put the bread in. Since Farmhouse White bakes at just 375°, 30 to 45 minutes is usually enough.

At SFBI, we did a 100% Spelt bread using dry instant yeast.  To soften the bitterness taste of spelt flour, we did a poolish as the preferment for this bread.  The result was very pleasing.  Two things about that spelt bread I found worthy of a mention from my own perspective: 

(1) The weak gluten in spelt flour is such that its mixing technique needs a bit of attention.  Its protein may be high (14.2% according to the bag of my organic spelt wholemeal flour), but a lot of it is not gluten forming protein.  However, while it is a weak flour, its gluten will happen fast (sounds counter-intuitive, doesn't it); and therefore, we need to mix faster when we are working on the spelt flour.  Towards that end, at SFBI, we used the double hydration method to try to get the gluten developed at an early stage before all recipe water is added.  (For a description of double hydration, please see my post on Chocolate Sourdough)  Also note that to mix faster does not mean that we use a vigorous mixing or kneading motion because spelt is a fragile flour. 

(2) The spelt poolish after it's been fermented shows a lot of foams on the surface.  The froth resulted from the weak flour unable to trap in gasses produced by the yeasts as seen below: 

                                                       Didier Rosada's thumb, Artisan III at SFBI, August 2009  

Theory aside, I have had no luck with the double hydration method using my bread machine.  So, with this 100% Spelt Sourdough, I used my old trusted hand method.  As well, I made another Pain le Levain with 20% Spelt flour that I posted yesterday to practice on my scoring and to see if I could get better grigne.  I suspected that the scoring in that earlier bake was difficult because I inadvertently incorporated too much water into the dough when I was stretching & folding my doughs with wet hands (the dough ended up much higher hydration than Hamelman's 68%).  I have found grigne almost not possible with wetter doughs. 

So, here are the two spelt sourdoughs:

My Formula for 100% Spelt Sourdough  

First levain build - day 1, night or early evening 

• 3 g starter (I used my usual white starter at 75% hydration, but at this quantity, any starter you have at any hydration will do.)
• 10 g spelt flour (I used 90% white spelt flour and 10% whole spelt flour)
• 11 g water

Second levain build - day 2, morning

• 24 g starter (all from the first levain build)
• 48 g spelt flour (I used 90% white spelt flour and 10% whole spelt flour)
• 48 g water

Final levain build - day 2, late night

• 120 g starter (all from the second levain build)
• 155 g spelt flour (I used 90% white spelt flour and 10% whole spelt flour)
• 155 g water

Note: as the ratio of flour to starter is less than 1. 5 times, if your room temperature is very warm, you'll need to do this levain built as late as possible for the next day's dough mixing.

Final dough - day 3, very early morning

• 430 g Spelt starter @ 100% hydration (all from the final levain build)
• 224 g water
• 387 g organic white spelt flour (90% of final dough flours)
• 43 g organic wholemeal spelt flour (10% of final dough flours)
• 12 g salt
• Extra spelt flour for dusting

Total dough weight 1.1 kg and dough hydration 68%

1. In my big mixing bowl, I first put in the starter, then poured a little of the formula water, stirred to combine, then a little more of the water, stirred to combine, then a little more of the water, and stirred, until all water was thoroughly mixed into the starter.  (I have found this way my starter works very well for me; it is as if all of the little microorganisms are woken up to do their morning aerobics.)
2. I put in the rest of the ingredients and stirred them just until they were combined and no dry flour was visible; more work than that at this stage was not necessary.
3. Autolyse 25 minutes
4. First set of stretch & folds (I did 100 strokes, more than my usual, to try to build up dough strength.  I wet my hands to do the S&F's so the dough doesn't stick to my fingers.)
5. After 30 - 40 minutes, the 2nd set of S&F's was done (I did another 100 strokes.  The dough felt silky and smooth, and quite elastic (there was good gluten development.)
6. After another 30 - 40 minutes, I did the 3rd set of S&F's (100 strokes again).
7. Dusted some spelt flour on the work bench.
8. 30 minutes from the last S&F's, I pre-shaped the dough by way of a minimalist S&F's so that I could pick up the whole dough easily with one hand and dump it on the floured surface (right side was against the flour, ie, seam side was up).  Cover.
9. Rest for 15 - 20 minutes.  In the mean time, a linen lined basket was dusted with flour.
10. Shaped the dough first by gathering the edges of the dough to the centre, turned the dough over (so that the seam side was now down), then shaped it into a very tight ball.  Placed it in the proofing basket.  Up to this point, bulk fermentation had been about 2 and a 1/2 hours.
11. Proof for another 2 hours (and in the mean time, I planned when the oven was to be turned on for pre-heating).
12. Bake with steam at 230C / 450 F for 20 minutes and another 25 minutes at 220 - 210 C.

It was quite a cold morning (for a spring time) when the dough was bulk fermenting and proofing.  While I was putting on a sweater to keep myself warm, it never entered into my mind that my dough might need extra flour time because of the low temperature.  It was almost as if that I wanted to behave myself by sticking to a set formula - ie, bulk fermentation 2 and 1/2 hours and proofing 2 hours.  This is the reason why formulas don't always work because there are a lot of details that are not spelled out but which are critical.  A time-table of bulk fermentation of x number of hours and proofing of x number of hours is on the basis of a certain dough temperature and ambient temperature perimeter as well as the amount of the pre-fermented flour as a percentage of the total flours, etc.  While we may know those base temperatures and percentages very well, we may not be quick enough to adjust for our scenarios, which incidentally is never exactly the same as the last one. 

Because of the low temperature, the fermentation should have been at least 1/2 to one hour longer.  The crumb could have been more open, I believe, if the yeasts in the levain had been given a longer time to work.  The effect may be more apparent in the 20% spelt levain bread below (and I would like to come back to this point again).

Despite the above, this 100% spelt levain bread has a lovely crumb flavor.  Because of the way the levain was built up and its hydration, the acidity is very well balanced with the nutty flavour of the spelt flour.  I didn't taste the bitterness, very often associated with spelt.  The sourness is less than medium strength to me.

My formula for the 20% Spelt levain bread - please refer to my post yesterday.

To adjust for the fact that I normally dip my hands in water before I stretch & fold the dough, I did 1% less hydration in this dough.  As well, I did 100 strokes at each set of S & F's, trying to build up more dough strength for the "grigne" that I was looking for (but was unable to get in that last bake).  These two being the only adjustments, see how different the profile and the crust of this bread look compared to those posted yesterday:   

When the dough was loaded onto the baking stone, it was about 3 - 4 cm in height; it rose to about 12 - 13 cm in its oven spring.  I think the 100 strokes of S&F's were doing the trick.

For signs of good fermentation, I look at the cell structure of the crumb, especially the area where there was no visible big holes - I think the parts where there are no holes tell more story about the fermentation than the area where there are a lot of holes.  In the crumb shots above: 

(1) where there are no holes (big or small), you see that the cell structure is quite dense; and

(2) where there are holes, they are not all there to register the presence of yeast fermentation, but they could possibly be there due to the way my hand stretch and folds the dough - it is possible that I had simply folded in too much air than I should have. 

The somewhat dense cell structure (where there are no holes) tells me that the fermentation probably did not happen at the optimum temperature, given the time in which the levain had to work.  From this I learned that, even with the same formula, each bread is a new situation to be assessed independently in terms of its action plans regarding dough strength and fermentation.   

It is a flavorful bread just the same with very mild acidity.  If I could get yesterday's cell structure with today's crust and grigne, it would be a near perfect world for me.

Shiao-Ping