bread #2 – the saturday whole wheat bread

This weekend whole wheat bread made it’s way into my life.  As with the Saturday White, this was a single day recipe bake. And as with last weekend I ended up baking without advance planning. Which meant my pantry wasn’t properly stocked with the necessary flours! This recipe calls for 750 grams of whole wheat flour and 250 grams of all purpose unbleached – aka home-style all purpose.  Here’s my story..

Weights and measurements : 556 grams of whole wheat flour (all that I had left); 444 grams of all purpose flour; autolyse with 800 grams (the Saturday White called for 720 grams) of water at a temperature 95 degrees, brought down to 88 degrees after mixing and resting; 23 grams of fine sea salt and 3 grams of commercial yeast; post mixing temperature of 82 degrees; shaping temperature 77 degrees; room temperature for most of the day was about 74 degrees. That said, I ended up using about 25% less whole wheat flour in my version of the recipe. The dough was understandably denser than the Saturday White even though it had a higher water content. It was not only tackier when mixing and folding, but also had less give when folding. But the dough did seem to rise to three times it’s size faster than I recall from last Saturday’s white bread dough.

Timeline: autolyse at 9:35am; first folding in of yeast and salt by 10:10am; second fold by 10:40am; third fold at 12 noon; shaped at 3:35pm and rested into banneton baskets; they were proofed and baked at 475 degrees upper middle rack (dutch oven method) by 5:15pm; 30 minutes with lid on; both loaves were given 18 minutes without the lid to form a nice dark brown crust. As I cooked one at a time, I covered one of the proofing loaves with plastic and put it in the fridge about 20 minutes before the first bake.

Results: The smell, taste and crust of both loaves was very good.  It might have been just me, but these loaves were very aromatic – much more that the Saturday White loaves from last weekend.  They had a good crunchy crust and were not chewy. That said, I think they could have benefited from an additional few minutes in the oven.  This week I raised the rack to the upper middle level.  The bread bottom crusts weren’t as dark/burnt as last week, but still a bit charred. I’m not entirely sure how to over come this. I might get an oven thermometer to see if my oven burns hot. I might need to lower the temperature from 475 degrees if that’s the case.

I made these yesterday. I’m not a fan of soft crusts, so I left them out over night as putting them in a plastic bag would soften them. The half eaten loaf was left cut side down on a cutting board while the second loaf was left uncut and uncovered on the cooling rack.  I had some more tonight and the bread tasted even better today fully cooled. But the crust was a bit softer than I thought it would be.  Although it still had lots of crunch it seemed to slightly soften for some reason. Last week’s Saturday white bread had much more crunch to it.  All in all, a really great whole wheat bread. I would make this again. Enjoy the pictures.