Bread Cavern, or Red Fife Hydration Question
My question is about the hydration of freshly milled Red Fife flour. I recently purchased Red Fife and Yecora Rojo flours from Breadtopia. I first used the Red Fife flour in Peter Reinhart’s Whole Grain Breads 100% Whole Wheat Sandwich recipe. The instructions are creating a biga with about half the flour and 1 g yeast at 75% hydration, another half of the flour in a soaker with milk and salt at 87% hydration, and storing overnight the biga cold and the soaker at room temperature. The final dough is assembled with more yeast, oil, sweetener, and additional flour. Final hydration is 72%. This is the as written bakers percentage summary:
I have been using this biga/soaker method for several months and have made minor modifications to the formula by adding kefir and vital wheat gluten to the soaker and liquid lecithin to the final dough. I found the hydration to be too high when using the Red Fife flour compared to King Arthur whole wheat or white whole wheat flours. The dough was very slack (but had a proper windowpane) and I needed to add a significant amount of extra flour to get a somewhat workable dough; final hydration was ≈63%. When I sliced the loaf after cooling overnight, I found that there was a cavern that extended about 3/4ths the length of the loaf. The flour had been milled a few days before I had used it.
Two weeks later, I baked another loaf using a lower starting hydration and no lecithin. The dough was more workable and final hydration was ≈58%. The loaf turned out better, although it was slightly overproofed as evidenced by the slight collapse in the crown.
Is the behavior of the Red Fife flour due to the nature of Red Fife flour, the fact that it was freshly milled, or some other reason?
Will the Yecora Rojo flour behave similarly to the Red Fife?
Thanks!
I’ve baked a fair bit with 100% whole red fife, however, it wasn’t home milled. However, I can speak to the hydration that this grain can take and surprisingly to me at least, it isn’t as thirsty as I expected a whole grain to be. Freshly home milled it would be even less thirsty. When I baked a 100% whole red fife sourdough loaf at 80% I found it to be a bit over hydrated. Another issue with this grain, is it that isn’t very tolerant of fermentation. So with other grains I can easily push bulk fermentation quite far, this was overproofed at very low levels of fermentation. If you have a look at my blog you’ll see my bakes.
My most successful one was only 75% hydration, but I think that was a bit too dry and I suspect my red fife would be better around 77-78% hydration.
I think your loaf with the cavern is a bit underproofed as evidenced by the cavern/tunnel and the great oven spring that it had.
Any flour that you freshly mill will likely be less thirsty than one you purchase already milled and stored in a dry environment. I haven’t any experience with Yecora Rojo as it isn’t available anywhere near me so cannot comment on it. I have persisted with red fife because I think it is a great tasting heritage grain.
Benny