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Report on Avergne Rye-Wheat Boule (Ginsberg pps 111-113):
Recipes without pictures put you under less pressure to produce a loaf that looks like the carefully styled picture, which may be the best of a dozen or more loaves produced before the photo shoot.
Ginsberg calls this a boule, which usually means a circular shaped loaf, but he specifies making a football shape and I, of course, made it more rectangular.
The recipe makes around a kilogram of dough for one loaf. (I got about 30 grams less dough than the recipe called for, I guess I didn't scrape the starter bowls enough.) The post-bake weight after cooling was 820 grams.
I did have to add a little more water to the rye starter, it was at 100% hydration and it just sat there for a few hours, before I stirred in a little more water. By morning it was very active.
The dough comes together easily, shapes easily and rises well. It takes an interesting approach to the question of whether you add dry to wet or wet to dry, you stir the two starters into the water and then add that to the dry flour. That has the advantage that it doesn't cause a cloud of flour from the mixer, which is often the case if you put the starter in the bottom of the bowl and the dry ingredients on top. I may have to try that with other starter-based breads.
I lowered the temperature a little more than the recipe specified after the steam pan came out, it came out with a nice dark crust.
The interior is also nice and dark, the crust is quite firm but it slices easily.
My wife says it doesn't have much of a rye smell after cooling, she thought it smelled more like a beer bread. I thought the aroma had pleasant smokey notes to it, most likely due to the charring of the crust.
It has a strong but not overpowering sourdough tang to it, and it toasts very well. It probably wouldn't make a good sandwich bread, but I could see eating a slice of it with a hearty bowl of soup or stew.
Update: This rye bread actually went well with the baked ham I made today, it has a very different flavor profile than a deli-style rye, the ham brings out sweet undernotes in the Avergne wheat-rye.
I made too much dough for the first Pullman pan test, I used a total of 36 ounces of flour, next time I'll cut that to 32 or maybe 30. I didn't bake it with the lid on so it was free to rise well above the rim.
If the lid was on the slices would be 4x4, at the center the loaf is more like 5 1/2 inches high. There's also a 'keyhole' in it, probably a shaping issue. But overall, it was a good test and the bread is fine, though maybe not quite as fine-grained as it would be with the lid on.
