Too much of a "good" thing? A short tale of caution.
Gosselin levain baguettes with Whole Wheat
Referencing back to David Snyder's wonderful levain version of the also wonderful Gosselin baguettes, I decided to make another change and subbed out a bunch of the AP flour for Whole Wheat. This brought the whole grain, including what is in the levain itself up to ~33% of the total flour. A pretty hearty version.
My baguette scoring skills are pretty good and I usually get a fine oven spring and bloom. Consistent results with relatively little spacing between the scores themselves. In this case, the scores were so close together that half of them were not able to keep their integrity and, quite literally, burst at the seams. As easy as pie to see in the photos. Scores too close together, bloom being so robust, or a little of both? It isn't hard to see where the scores were overmatched by the oven spring. The handsome fellow in the foreground has an accidental bloom so large it might be mistaken for a luggage handle. But...that is not what I was after.
My standard 75% hydration levain goop with added grams of water to get the overall total dough hydration back up to ~75%. 1 batard @ ~600g, 3 baguettes @ ~300g. Also employed my standard method of retard, shape after a few hours (time frame irrelevant) back to retard (time frame somewhat irrelevant) and finally baked directly out of the refrigerator.
Works like a charm - except for the breaching of the scored lines part of the business. Oh well, live learn and eat more bread. As I mentioned to bread1965 in his recent post - it's a hobby!
alan
Comments
and dream about pumpernickel:-) Get to 50% and then you win the prize for healthy and hearty baggies! Love the bold bake, bloom and spring even though the higher whole grains will limit the blisters a bit. The bloom points to a nice crumb I'm guessing. Bet they taste great too! My favorite restaurant saying is you can't eat the atmosphere. It holds true for bread - you can't eat their good looks. Well done and happy baking
I will not introduce dog drool into the mix. Until the benefits are known, I'll steer clear of that kind of hydration! Just keep your ankle biter away from my mixing bowl!
Don't know what bug got me to swap out some of the AP for WW, but when I looked at the formula for a 1500g mix and the AP was 680g, I just plain decided to cut it down to 500g AP and 180g WW. And glad I did.
Agree with the adage, but also agree with "we eat with our eyes before we eat with our mouths", so there is something to that as well. There have been a number of studies that link taste perception to the color or shape of the plate it is served on. Among the more important have been for getting seniors to consume greater quantity, more nutritious or less enhanced (i.e. adding too much salt) foods as a method of ensuring healthier diets for them.
eat better. The latest survey says that we eat 3 times too much salt and when they went to ;look where this salt was coming from. the researchers said they found that 80% of it was coming from bread :-) I guess the best thing is to cut bread consumption by a factor of 3.75 or cut the salt by that much. Next week you should only bake 1 baguette because no salt in bread makes it taste bad no matter how good it looks :-)