Field Blend #2 two ways (sort of)

I took a hard break from my standard baguette life to help my sister in law get her nascent bread skills some training wheels while she was visiting from far away.   I decided to do boule shaping with her, less challenging than the whole baguette pre-shape/shape/score shebang, and selected a bread I’ve never done before, in basically a shape I don’t do.  So it was discovery for both of us, but in different ways.

I’ve dined at Ken Forkish’s Trifecta Tavern in Portland and if I can recall correctly, he serves the Field Blend #2 bread to his guests.  It was delicious and so I took the plunge.  

Using my ~three month old levain culture – meaning that it hadn’t been refreshed for that long and which still has quite a bit of get-up-and-go, we followed FWSY instructions with a caveat or two.  Needing 360g of the 80% levain for the two boules, we only built 400g of levain from the culture and sacrificed a mere 40g of overage to the trash bin vs. how Mr. Forkish builds it in his book.  Count me among the throng of TFLers in deciding to not follow his full levain build amount.

I tried to mostly keep hands off and let my sister in law do most of the heavy lifting, with an ever present eye and words of correction/encouragement over her shoulder.  I was given a banneton proofing basket as a gift a year back, unused and lonely in a dark corner of my closet, until this very episode.  As such, I christened it by rubbing rice flour into the basket and also into a small ceramic bowl.  Not having worked with these before I was concerned with a 78% dough with rye flour not releasing and sticking to the surfaces after proofing.  And so I over-floured the basket and bowl with standard AP flour on top of the rice flour, a mistake which I will attempt to avoid next time around.  I let Sandra use the basket and I put my boule into the bowl for overnight proofing in the refrigerator.

Having only 1 Dutch Oven, the decision was made to bake both at the same time.  Hers in the DO and mine on the ceramic tile baking deck in my oven.  Then the oven was steamed my standard way – both Sylvia’s steaming towel and my baking pan of lava rocks with a near-boiling water pour-over.  

The same initial 30 minutes for the covered DO and steam for the deck boule, the final 15-20 minutes uncovered and steam released.  Below is what this first attempt looked like.  Way too much raw flour on the banneton boule.  What surprised me the most is that my baked-on-the-deck boule did not split on top.  I didn’t score it, as it went into the oven seam side up, but the seam did not open.  Hmm.

After Sandra leaves town later this week, I’ll try the whole thang on my own once more, “second verse same as the first”*.  I think that the second iteration will boast better results, with a bit of learning curve applied as well as my more practiced hands in the mix.  I’m curious as to how these will stack up side by side the next time.  We shall see.

alan

*Herman’s Hermits – “I’m Henry the Eighth”