Country Kitchen Loaves
Yesterday I decided to make up a recipe that would have these parameters:
Dark crusty exterior, finer crumb, large, lots of slashes, have a taste like the large farm kitchen loaves with the added milk.
So I started at 10:30 in the morning, and already had a nice bucket of motherdough (I had this motherdough at 100% hydation, but I am now keeping it at 80% hydration , when I refresh I add 400g water and 500g flour) going and well fermented so I decided to use it for flavor and color and skip the extra night fermentation. The loaves were successful except for the slashes did not bloom as well as I would have expected.
Here is a picture of the loaves :
Here is the crumb:
As you can see, I got what I was after. The only thing I wasn’t happy about, is that I wanted a lot of slashes, but the slashes, made the bread spread too much in the first loaf, and didn’t bloom much in the second loaf. I had the dough at 63% hydration, so I thought that was a low enough hydration loaf to support a lot of slashes. I am pretty sure it was the fact that the loaves were too large (2lb 11 oz) for my regular baskets and I had to use plastic bowls. The skin on the dough didn’t dry enough to support a lot of slashes. I wish I had at my disposal, a very large number of bannetons and baskets of different sizes and shapes!If anyone has any other ideas as to why my loaves spread too much or the slashes didn’t bloom, I would certainly like to hear it!