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I've posted these before, the Hamelman sesame semolina batards alfanso-style - meaning subbing out the very liquidy bread flour levain for my very liquidy rye flour levain.  Delivering 15% rye flour (all through the levain) to boost the flavor in this bread.  The composition of flours is; semola rimacinata 60%, bread flour 25%, and rye flour 15% @67% overall hydration.

I believe that I have the consistency part down pretty well.  So instead, let's talk about steam, shall we alfanso?  Okie Doakie, let's roll...  Recently there has been some interaction on the part of a few participants including myself and Doc.Dough, with a series of private messages between myself and the good doctor. Including this top notch video and blog entry courtesy of Doc.Dough - lots of steaming discussion included in the comments.  

As with others on TFL, I employ a double dose of steaming components which have me insert one loaf pan with a Sylvia's Steaming Towel into the lower rack of the oven ~15 minutes prior to the bake.  Once the dough is loaded I add 2 cups of near boiling water to a lava rock filled casserole pan.  This creates dabrownman's so named mega-steam effect.  Historically I've been leaving the steaming going for somewhere in the neighborhood of 11-13 minutes.  And I'm sufficiently happy with the outcome.

Now along comes Doc.Dough with his micrometers, calipers and what-not trying to upset my baking pushcart.  Purveying the notion with engineered knowledge that the effect of steam is negated after somewhere around the 5 minute mark.  Anything beyond that is equivalent to window dressing.  

What is an alfanso to make of all this fact based information, when all along I've been getting the job done by nothing more than "educated" guesswork, experimentation and personal experience?  Well, if I were me, I'd be curious enough to see where the oven spring has taken my dough at that 5 minute mark.  Because as with all of us, I hope to get better and more understanding of baking over the long haul.

For these past few bakes, instead of setting my timer to the trusty 11-13 minute mark I've been setting it to the 5 minute mark so that I can peer through the oven door window and take a gander at what's what.  And ya know something?  For the most part I'm becoming a believer!  The baguettes do open up (almost) all the way at that mark.  However, I find that the batards still have not maxed out yet, and they take a few minutes more.

And so I've turned a corner here and pretty much gotten on board.  I still like keeping the steam going for close to my requisite time, but I can now see the doc's point of view.  I don't see any downside to leaving the steam going, although my experimentation has been limited to maybe 3 or 4 bakes.  So I'l continue to slog on and see how this goes with some other types of dough.  Always something new to be learned in this doughy business.  Thanks, Doc.

And now a very few words on the consistency thing:

Nov., 2016:

 and this morning:

If you have never made a bread with cream cheese yet, I urge you to give it a try.  The cream cheese really turns out a moist and creamy crumb.

The addition to the smashed potatoes with the durum and Kamut flours resulted in a moist, flavorful bread with a moderately open crumb.  This one is perfect for grilled bread, panninis, and simply with some olive oil or butter.

Formula

Download the BreadStorm File Here.

Levain Directions

Mix all the Levain ingredients together for about 1 minute and cover with plastic wrap.  Let it sit at room temperature for around 8-12 hours or until the starter is nice and bubbly.

Either use in the main dough immediately or refrigerate for up to 1 day before using.

 Main Dough Procedure

Mix the flours, cracked wheat and the water together in your mixer or by hand until it just starts to come together, maybe about 1 minute.  Let it rest in your work bowl covered for 60 minutes up to several hours.  Next add the salt, starter (cut into about 7-8 pieces), olive oil, potatoes, and cream cheese and mix on low for 4 minutes.  Remove the dough from your bowl and place it in a lightly oiled bowl or work surface and do several stretch and folds.  Let it rest covered for 10-15 minutes and then do another stretch and fold.  Let it rest another 10-15 minutes and do one additional stretch and fold.  After a total of 2 hours place your covered bowl in the refrigerator and let it rest for 12 to 24 hours.  (If you have a proofer you can set it to 80 degrees and follow above steps but you should be finished in 1 hour to 1.5 hours).

When you are ready to bake remove the bowl from the refrigerator and let it set out at room temperature still covered for 1.5 to 2 hours.  Remove the dough and shape as desired.   Place your dough into your proofing basket(s) and cover with a moist tea towel or plastic wrap sprayed with cooking spray.  I used some smoked bamboo sesame seeds and garlic sesame seeds on the bottom of the basked.  The dough will take 1.5 to 2 hours depending on your room temperature.  Let the dough dictate when it is read to bake not the clock.

Around 45 minutes before ready to bake, pre-heat your oven to 550 degrees F. and prepare it for steam.  I have a heavy-duty baking pan on the bottom rack of my oven with 1 baking stone on above the pan and one on the top shelf.  I pour 1 cup of boiling water in the pan right after I place the dough in the oven.

Right before you are ready to put them in the oven, score as desired and then add 1 cup of boiling water to your steam pan or follow your own steam procedure.

After 1 minute lower the temperature to 450 degrees.  Bake for 25-35 minutes until the crust is nice and brown and the internal temperature of the bread is 210 degrees.

Take the bread out of the oven when done and let it cool on a bakers rack before for at least 2 hours before eating.

The copycat is back, that would be me.  David Snyder's recent post on his work in progress, Semolina Capriccioso, had my brain already plotting a visit to this bread, especially as he described the taste.  I've already professed my adoration for his Sourdough Italian Baguette bread a few times on TFL.  So the wheels encased inside my cranium were turning and I just had to scratch that itch.  Y'all know what I mean!

I was interested in making a trip down to North Miami Beach (hint - don't go there expecting a beach, the name is a misnomer) to the only really real Italian market that I know of in these parts - Lorenzo's.  And here is what I saw.  Ian and other pizza aficionados - I'm talking to you!  5kg bags of 00 pizza flour for US$15.

But that wasn't what I went for.  No, I came home with this:

Lorenzo's has shelves of semolina and semolina rimacinata.  Those plastic containers are full of semolina rimacinata too, but at US$1 per pound.  I didn't see them until I was just about at the checkout counter.  Boy what a haul!  (not to mention the goat butter too)

So off to the task I went.  I used my 50% hydration rye starter for the 50% hydration durum biga in the late morning, and by evening saw no signs of life.   So I started a second biga using my ever-ready 75% hydration levain, fed it down to 50% and built the biga for an overnight ferment.  By early morning it had doubled, as David suggested it should, and so I used that and discarded the rye starter version.  Here are the two bigas at daybreak Easter Sunday:

I reformulated the original formula weight for 50% more than David's and came up with about 1565g for a mix.  Wanting to try my hand at my French Folds at this 80% hydration dough and to not rely on my mixer, I was successful, but added another 100 FFs because the dough was so slack and David wrote that his mixer was whirring for ~12 minutes.  Still, the dough was completely workable by hand, no mixer was employed and it was billowy with some tension .  And this is what the dough looked like after the 400th FF:

I didn't want to interrupt the development of the gluten during the mixing phase, so I added the toasted sesame seeds during the first of the five Letter Folds.  And this is what it looked like just as it was to be retarded.

I figured on 2 600g batards and one ~340g baguette.  The dough was indeed a bit slack and the rolling of the baguette certainly attested to that.  But although the batards were equally slack, they were much easier to form and did not present any problems at all.

At bake time I apparently made the 2 middle scores on the baguette too close together again and the oven spring just blew right past them.  Still need more work on perfecting the double score on batards as these were a little bit too offset in parity.  I think that the shorter scores on this type of dough as a baguette are more iffy than on the batards because the dough is so wet and the seeds also help weigh down the shorter scored flap during oven spring.

The baguette baked for 27 minutes, the batards for 30 minutes plus a 6 minute oven venting, oven off.

Changes from David's O.P.:

• Used bread flour instead of AP flour.
• Mixed by hand - 400 French Folds (they go fast!  Faster than the time that the dough was in David's mixer.)
• Incorporated the sesame seeds on the first Letter Fold.  More than I imagined once I saw them spread out across the dough.
• Kitchen at ~80dF, therefore 5 Letter Folds at 25 minute intervals.
• Retarded for approx. 10 hours prior to divide and shaping   As I've stated before, the number of hours between retard and shaping is virtually irrelevant.
• After divide, and shaping they went on a couche and back into the retarder for an overnight nap.
• The batards were robust enough to stand up to rolling them on a wet paper towel and then in a plate full of sesame seeds.

Baked straight out of the refrigerator, no warmup.  Here the steam had just been released. 

The taste is lovely!

April 2 update:  I re-formulated to exchange the 50% hydration semolina biga with my own 75% standard levain.  I also adjusted the final dough amount of flour and water to abide by the 60% durum flour in the mix and also to maintain the 80% hydration level.  As I didn't perceive any benefit to the sesame seeds inside the braed, so I also eliminated that as well.  

For a first run, I kept the total dough weight down to 2x500g batards.  More experimentation with larger batards will soon be underway.  And then I can write up a little more about it.  Just one picture from this run should demonstrate that the results are about the same, and the bread is just as delicious.

alan

As of late I've been moving towards a double score on my batards rather than what has become my standard single score.  I am pleased with the results I've seen so far.  The trick, and it is a learned trick, is to keep both blooms as consistent with each other as possible rather than having one big bubble of a bloom and one not so much.  I'm getting there.  And another trick to now put into my bag.  More practice will have to happen to lock it in.

Hamelman Pain au Levain with mixed starters

alan