100% Bolted Whole Wheat
Weekend of October 9th 2020
Planning — Thursday Night
Thursday night is planning the weekend baking. I have to work around:
- Saturday 2pm to 6pm : Kid’s soccer tournament
- Sunday 1pm to 4pm : Eagles Game
- Chores Saturday or Sunday morning
I also am thinking I’ll use the discard to make Golden Sourdough Waffles from The Perfect Loaf, and pizza dough.
Other variables I have is the kind of flour I have at home. I have some Castle Valley Mill Bolted Hard Wheat & some Castle Valley Mill Whole Rye along with some bread flour.
Since I haven’t seen many recipes for bolted whole wheat I think I’ll try to adapt this 100% bolted whole wheat from Girl Meets Rye.
My starter is a 1:1 (100% hydration) starter with all-purpose flour. I also like to make 2 loaves a weekend and the Girl Meets Rye recipe is only for 1 loaf. My planned schedule & recipe below.
Friday night (10pm) mix a levain that can be used for pizza & bread
- 150g all purpose flour
- 150g rye flour
- 300g of 70 degree H2O
- 50g starter
Saturday morning (9am) mix dough for autolyse
- 850g of 70 degree H2O (using less water than the Girl Meets Rye recipe as I want to see how much the bolted flour that I have will absorb.
- 1000g of bolted whole wheat
Saturday morning (11am) fully mix dough by adding to the dough
- 20g fine sea salt (Wegmans)
- 200g levin
I am going for a longer bulk fermentation than the original recipe. Because of this I am using water on the cooler side (70 degrees F) and less levin. I plan for bulk fermenting for 8ish hours.
I’ll still do a set of 3 folds in the first 2 hours. This should leave me time to get to the soccer game while the bread is fermenting.
Saturday night (7pm) shape the loaves and retard in fridge overnight
Sunday morning (6am) bake the loaves
At 6am I’ll preheat the oven to 500 degrees F with my cloches (dutch oven would work great too) inside.
At 7am put the bread in the oven with lid on, after 15 min turn the oven down to 475, then after another 15 min take the lid off then cook for another 15–20 min or until the internal temp reaches 210 degrees.
Levain — Friday night
Ended up mixing at 8pm. The rye really soaks up the water so it looks pretty stiff.
Temperature in the room was 72 degrees F and left overnight.
Mixing — Saturday Morning
Saturday morning was a bit cooler, 67 degrees in the kitchen. Glad I mixed the levain a bit early, at this temperature I think a few extra hours to ferment is a good thing.
9:03am : Coffee ready, starting mixing for the autolyse
9:10am : Mixing finished, cover the dough and leave out. The flour did take quite a bit of the water. For temperatures the flour was 60 degrees (I keep my whole grains in the refrigerator; I tried to take it out to come up to room temp), the water ended up being 80 degrees, and left me with a final dough temperature of 75 degrees.
11:03am : Time to put it all together. To the already mixed dough I added 200g levain. The dough looked a little dry so I added another 50g of water, dissolved 20g salt in that water. Final dough temperature was 72 degrees F.
11:09am : Put the dough in my proofing container.
I performed 4 folds
- 11:22am
- 11:44am
- 12:10pm
- 1:00pm
Then I let it sit out at room temperature (70 degrees) while I went to the soccer tournament.
Shaping — Saturday Evening
The dough obviously fermented, although didn’t quite rise as much as was expected (hoped?)
7:21pm : Took the dough out of the proofing container and did a pre-shape. Let it sit covered with a kitchen towel for a bit.
7:50 pm : Time for doing the shaping and putting in the proofing baskets.
7:55pm : Covered the baskets with plastic (I find the plastic bags from the produce section of the grocery store work perfectly) and put in the refrigerator overnight.
Baking — Sunday Morning
Got the stove on at 6:50am, going to let it preheat for an hour or so with my cloches inside.
Took the loaves out of the refrigerator at 7:40am, started the scoring process around 8am
Started baking at 8:05am — I followed the cooking time tables above, covered 500 degrees for 15 min, then 475 for 15 minutes, then uncovered at 475 for another 15 minutes.
Final Result
If definitely got some good oven spring, but also tore in places I didn’t quite want it to. This may mean my scoring wasn’t deep enough. I suppose it’s also possible that it was a bit under fermented.
The inside is a bit tacky (that could be because I couldn’t wait the full hour until it cooled ) and some unevenness of the holes. Taste is of a decent whole wheat, not amazing (compared to other artisan loaves, compared to mass produced bread it tastes amazing).
Overall I’m happy with the loaves. They will get gobbled up shortly and this gives me a good baseline to experiment with.
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