Abel's SuperLevain

Abel Sierra posted another in his series of fascinating outside-of-the-box things that one can do with just Flour Water and Salt two weeks ago.  And I am indeed fascinated at the breadth of what one can do creatively with just these three ingredients.   And that also meant another that I would warehouse until the time came.  Which was now!

The character of the baked bread is really wonderful.  It has a thin and crisp snap to the crust while the crumb is tender and sweet.  A really nice bread in every measure.

This is a 100% hydration liquid levain, 75% overall hydration mix that uses a full 50% of the flour in the levain pre-ferment.  Which is somewhat off the charts considering the "normal" range is in the 5%-20% vicinity.  But that is what caught my eye.  Although this is an all white flour affair, a very small number of grams of WW and rye snuck in due to my base starter having these two rogue elements.

The dough is incredibly slack and stayed that way throughout the entire process.  Because of this I had a fair amount of trouble wrangling the dough to form baguettes, with them becoming somewhat inconsistent and misshapen, but managed to get a decent enough shape and subsequent bake.  The batard was a cinch to shape.  

Where I differed from Abel in the process was to shorten the bulk rise with two S&Fs to his one, and to retard until the next day rather than execute the entire process in a single calendar day as Abel stated he did.

My follow-up attempt will be to change two things and see whether that will yield some improvements in the shaping as well as to provide a more robust flavor - without sacrificing any of the clean AP taste.  The plan is to do an 85% AP / 15% Rye flour mix with all of the rye incorporated into the levain.  As for shaping, instead of my standard pre-shape logs, the next time will have me pre-shape as small boules, and I think that this will facilitate with the rolling of the baguettes.

Thanks Abel.

500g x 1 batard

350g x 2 baguettes/long batards