DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Pictured is a cross-section of the best bread I’ve made in a year. I hit a perfect combination of dough hydration, timing, and oven technique.

I baked 25 loaves like this last year, and seven so far this year. Yesterday’s two were superior: crunchy crusts with nice Maillard coloring, chewy crumbs with fully gelatinized starches, distinct but not overpowering sour flavor.

The recipe is always the same, or nearly so — my own multigrain sourdough. Yesterday I made three changes from the usual procedure:

1. I used no whole-wheat flour in the dough (although I did use it to refresh the starter). Because the finished dough contains such a high percentage of non-gluten grains (spelt and rye) and flax seeds, the finished bread is usually somewhat dense. This time, I used high-protein organic bread flour (Guisto’s Ultimate Performer, about 14% protein) exclusively to compensate for the other grains and seeds’ lack of gluten. This made for a somewhat lighter loaf and a significantly more open crumb.
2. I used 33% more starter, adjusting flour and water in the final mix to compensate. Using a higher percentage of starter in the dough can bring more flavor, at the possible risk of accelerating yeast growth to the point where the dough rises too quickly, the yeast cells die off, and the loaf gets acidic and nasty.
3. I cooked the hell out of the breads. I was going for what bakers euphamistically call a “European bake,” which is what you get when you pull the bread out about a minute before the crust turns black. I pushed these about as hard as I could; in fact I was pretty sure I’d burned one of them, because when I thwacked it it sounded like an empty shell.

The dough turned out wetter than usual. This means it both rises faster (less resistance to gas pressure from the wild yeast) and needs to be baked earlier (so the yeast still has a kick when the dough starts to spread in the oven). The higher-than-usual percentage of strong flour lent the crumb some structural assistance. And the deep baking ensured a thorough gelatinization of starches, as evidenced by the shiny translucence of the thin walls around air pockets in the crumb. This is the science behind great bread — for more, read Reinhart or even McGee.)

We served the bread with a recreation of the spread we’d liked so much at Millennium, “truffled sun-dried tomato butter.” I had no recipe, so I dumped arbitrary amounts of each of the ingredients named in the title into the Cuisinart and whizzed it into a pink paste. It was awesome, although I felt oddly guilty for slathering the goo over my perfect crumb, not that that kept me from eating about a pint of the stuff.