5th attempt of my 50% Wholegrain loaf, we are getting there 🙂

Continuing with my practice recipe.

50% whole wheat

50% wheat flour 550

30% sourdough

I’m still deeply focused on understanding the interaction between dough temperature, volume increase, and bulk fermentation time. The result is really good and I’m very happy with it, but judging fermentation still often feels like guessing.

This time I slightly reduced the hydration to 80% (79.6% to be exact 😅). A very soft dough with potentially open crumb doesn’t help me if I can’t handle it gently because everything sticks.

I was able to control the dough temperature better again and reached my target of 28 °C. That allowed me to end bulk fermentation after about 4.5 hours at roughly a 70% volume increase.

This time I did one coil fold about halfway through bulk fermentation to build a bit more strength and structure in the dough.

I did about 8H of Cold retard and baked with 250C open on baking steel with steam.

What I find especially interesting is how different the crumb structure of the two loaves turned out. Basically, I tried to do everything exactly the same. The only real differences are the weight (not divided evenly) and the score, which was probably slightly sealed on one loaf.

I’d be really interested in your thoughts on why the loaves turned out so differently – if you made it this far 😅