Wild Yeast Garden Tomato Integral Bread

100% Whole Wheat Sourdough Garden Tomato Bread

Fast on the heels of the last Garden Tomato Bread, and while I was working all weekend and alone in the house over Thanksgiving, I was free to make a mess in the kitchen and use what limited time I had even when working 3x 12 hour shifts in a row to see if I could make a 100% Whole Wheat Garden Tomato Bread with my wild yeast. 

It was serendipitous.  At the last minute (late on Saturday), the nurses on our floor of the hospital decided to have a pot-luck on Sunday, and I was able to bake this bread on Sunday morning before heading off to work.  Thank goodness I had started making this bread on Friday night, because it takes about 3 days to make.

It meant a rather different schedule for the bread, lots of 12-14 hour retarding of the dough in odd places (even violating some of of Chad Robertson's Tartine Bread rules), but nevertheless it made for some tasty bread.

This time I made a typical Tartine-style bread, only I used my 100% whole wheat starter, and 100% whole wheat flour only (what Chad Robertson describes as an Integral).  There is no all purpose or bread flour in this bread.  I have hydrated it at 80%+ (75% to mix it up, with 5% extra to add the salt, paste, ginger, and seeds as before, plus whatever hydration the tomatoes bring), This time I used only 3 tomatoes.  I didn't squish the tomatoes down, so the tomato juice didn't get spread around quite as much as the last garden tomato bread I made.

The schedule:
Friday night, after work, @2030: refresh the sourdough, ensuring that you will have 200g of it ready to use in the morning (about 8 hours for this sourdough build).  Measure out the ingredients for the morning, since you'll be too pressed for time and sleep-groggy to do it properly in the morning.  Take a flashlight to the garden to collect the tomatoes and the herbs, since it is now dark when you leave and dark when you get home.  This time get a handful of nasturtiums too.

Saturday morning, before work @0500: mix the dough, giving it a 20 minute autolyse before adding the salt, paste, ginger, and seeds.  Turn it once 20 minutes later, then cover it and put it in the refrigerator to retard.  Forget it for 14 hours.

Saturday night @2030: get home from work, take the dough out of the fridge, let it rest a couple of hours to bring it to room temperature, then divide it and shape it and set it in baskets.  Put the covered baskets back into the fridge overnight, and fall asleep because you'll be getting up early.

 

Sunday morning: wake at @0450 and bake the bread: take the dough from the fridge, preheat the oven 20 minutes, and bake it 40 minutes.  Jump in the shower and then go, driving to work with a cooling loaf filling the car with fresh-baked bread scent.

Results
This was a good bread.   The crumb was mostly wide-crumbed, as a Tartine loaf is, but the very centre of the loaf had a couple of spots that were still a tiny bit moist.  I think that it could have used another 5-10 minutes of baking, but the crust was a gorgeous tawny, light-brown colour.  Overall, I was very pleased with this bread.

Few others appreciated it as much as I did.  As far as potlucks go, there was little else for me to eat, as I am a vegetarian: the store-bought pizzas, the home-made quiches and wraps all had meat or seafood on them.  So I ate my bread and some salads.  But few others ate my bread, from what I could tell.  I came home with half a loaf. 

You can taste the peppery flavour of the nasturtiums.  I love it.

Notes to Myself

• I think that squeezing the tomatoes to get the hydration up is a better idea than using water and simply adding chunks of tomato. It spreads the tomatoey flavour around more. Next time I will again press the tomatoes through a sieve to get the liquid separate, rather than using (so much) water.
• I have been using fine spelt flour for the lining of the proving baskets, and this seems to work as nicely as rice flour.
• The double retarding of the dough worked fine, even though Robertson says that the dough requires a long room-temperature bulk fermentation.  The final dough didn't seem overproofed to me. But probably it would have been a bit better if I had been able to bring it to room temperature a tiny bit longer than 20 minutes. Say, an hour?
• Most people other than me prefer a bit of all-purpose or bread flour in their bread.  I love whole wheat, whole grain, best, and will continue to bake to ensure I get it.  Just look at all the vitamins and minerals and fiber and oil you lose when you use a more processed flour!  And don't forget, you get less exorphins...