Eureka!

Ok, finally I got a result I am happy with and that shows I might be learning something after all.

As I have said many times, I am trying to get a bread loaf that grows enough so that I can end up with one of those beautiful, round loaves.

Today I got one that was way taller than what I have achieved so far, and that is really exciting!

Ingredients:

• Levain: 50g Pivetti Tipo 1, 50g water, 50g starter
• 50g Sammalt emmer
• 100g Pivetti Farina Integrale Bio
• 170g Pivetti Bio Tipo 1
• 30g Rye
• 233g water

It was supposed to be a 70% bread, but the water wasn’t enough to make the dough completely wet during autolyse, so I had to add a bit more water, which made me end up with a 72% bread.

Things I did different this time:

• I really reduced the hydration of this bread to something I felt comfortable with. The dough was pretty manageable when stretching and folding, and pre-shaping wasn’t very hard. I could feel that by the consistency this dough had a good chance to stay firm. Had I skipped autolyse I could have even less hydration (as the levain ends up adding enough hydration).
• It was on the fridge for around 17h.

I have no clue what was the biggest factor here. I will make other tests, one where I increase the hydration and leave it at the same time on the fridge, and another where I keep the same proportions and take it off the fridge sooner.

I wasn’t expecting the result to be so good, as emmer is a difficult flour to work with, and also because I didn’t feel that much gluten being developed. But hell it worked fine.