My second June Mellow Bakers' bread was a semolina levain. With life being busy and much to be baked, I knew we wouldn't want a lot, so I actually only made a tiny loaf (1/4 of the recipe).
It started with a liquid levain: Austin (my starter), bread flour, and water, which developed overnight. Then the preferment was mixed with more bread flour, a lot of semolina, salt, and water. My standmixer really struggled with this one: it was pretty wet and there was so little dough that the dough hook couldn't grab on. I ended up adding a bit more flour (JH says the dough should be a little drier than usual) and then kneading by hand...the dough was easy to work with once I'd added the extra flour.
My only hiccup with this one happened when I went to place the dough into my round banneton: I'd been working on prepping for the Vollkenbrot (our final June bread), so I unthinkingly dusted the banneton with coarse rye meal! When I realized what I'd done, I quickly took the dough out, brushed off as much as I could, and added semolina to the banneton instead. I retarded it in the fridge overnight, and slashed and baked this morning.
My little loaf baked for about 25 minutes (with the fake steaming method). How did it taste? Well, when I got home from work to take a picture of the crumb, this is how much was left:
Hubby, both of the kids, and I all loved it with a little butter. Hubby said it was the perfect snack bread (and the kids seemed to agree)...I thought it might make nice little buns, too.
This looks like a lovely bread!
ReplyDeleteI love breads with semolina! Looks like this one was a big hit. I'll definitely have to try it once I revive my starter.
ReplyDeleteI did almost exactly the same, dusted the bannetons with rye, only I didn't brush it off, rats, I thought and left it. Going to cut mine this morning and see how it came out. I like breads withs emonlina usually. I'm way behind on the the breads for MB. Time has got away from me recently on the baking front. xx
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