Desem - one big loaf instead of two

My Take on Desem, week 3

Here is the 3rd week of Desem. I wanted to see if I could bake it larger, instead of dividing the dough. I also used store-bought whole wheat flour for the final bake, since I was beginning to think that the flour I was milling was not quite fine enough. So the starter in this bread is hand-milled, but the bulk of the flour (4 cups worth) is whole wheat flour purchased at Arva Flour Mills.

This desem was refreshed daily with 1/3 c of fresh hand-milled whole wheat flour, except on the last day before the bake, when I added 1 full cup. One quarter of the desem was then reserved, and I built the bread with the 3/4 desem. Here was the full feeding schedule (as far as I know it):

Start: Desem 215g of 2 week old desem

Tues: 50g wwflour, 25g water

Wed: 49g wwflour, 17g water

Thurs: forgot to measure ingredients. Desem at end of feeding was 418g. Possibly added 50g wwflour, 16g water?

Fri: 49g wwflour, 19g water

Sat: 47g wwflour, 19g water

Sun: This day I added the ingredients quite late in the day, in the evening rather than in the morning. There was a smell of acetone. 48g wwflour, 20g water

Mon: 47g wwflour, 19g water

Tues: 1c = 156g wwflour, 97g water

End: Desem 912g

Of the end product, I reserved 228g of desem for the next week's build. But I would not refresh next week's desem daily -- rather, I would follow The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book's (LKBB) suggestion for a twice-weekly refresh, it seems somewhat less grueling.

Following the volume measurements of the Desem recipe in LKBB, I added the rest of the ingredients by weight:

• actual desem: 681g (I may have lost a few grams in the transfers from bowls)
• wwflour: 143g of hand-milled, 1359g storebought, for a total of 1502g
• sea salt: 18g
• water: 325g

 Mis en place

 Desem soaking in the lowest amount of water

 Mixed as well as I could in the bowl: going to start to knead in a few minutes

I deliberately tried to keep the water at the lower volume throughout, i.e. 1 1/3 c of water.   This made for a very stiff dough, when I was kneading.  The problem with this tight a dough ball is that the gluten cloak you are trying to form around the loaf continuously tears as you knead it.  This was such a problem toward the end of the 20 minutes of kneading (around the 16 minute mark) that I was forced to wet my hands to try to allow the dough to incorporate some of the extra drops.  But the fact of the matter is, this dough was probably just too dry.  My wrists were sore long after kneading this dough for 20 minutes.

 Kneading after 5 min

  Kneading after 10 min

  Kneading after 15 min

  Kneading after 20 min

Why was I keeping it so dry?  My intention was to make a free-standing loaf, baked on a stone covered with a roasting pan, to simulate the casserole baking idea. A wetter dough, I felt, would not properly stand up to the freestanding size.

But a few other things went wrong anyway, as per my usual baking process.

First of all, I mixed this up after working nights, and fell asleep following putting the dough in a bowl for the bulk fermentation.  This was only to have taken 4 hours, and I didn't get back to the dough until 6 1/2 hours had passed.  That surprised me: this qualifies as a pretty good daytime sleep, for me.  But of course, although I obviously needed it, my dough probably didn't.  By then, the top of the loaf was quite dry.

 Before I fell asleep: 0900

 When I woke up: 1530

Folds
Instead of dividing the loaf into 2, I kept it whole and just pounded it down and tried to make the folds.  This turned out to be not so pretty.  The gluten cloak just tore everywhere.  There was still some internal gluten structure that you could see through the tears, but this was very difficult to fold.  Like when you are folding cardboard into smaller and smaller pieces, and the last few folds are not true folds but are more like imperfect bends.

 Flatten out the dough

 Fold it: look at that dry reptilian gluten cloak

 Somehow manages to be a ball

 End of the second folding: gondwanalike crust drift

High Hydration
After the 2 folds with a 15 minute rest in between, I let it sit in the basket, covered with a bag to keep the humidity in, within my warm excalibur dehydrator,  for 1 1/2 hours before pre-heating the oven.  It took the full 30 minutes to get to the proper temperature because I had so much paraphernalia in there: baking stones, pans for water, roasting pans.

 All folded up, awaiting final 'proof'

 Into the humidified bag

 2 hours later: time to bake it

Now here I think I made another error: I canceled the timer on the oven by hitting 'cancel' instead of touching another button, and so the 450 degree F. oven was actually turned off for the first 15 minutes of the bake.  In other words, just when the oven should have been the very hottest for the rise of the loaf, with steam, it was instead a cooling oven.  At the 15 minute mark, I corrected this, but from then on the baking only went at 350 degrees F.  I did give it an extra 15 minutes at the end of the hour, not only for this mistake, but because this was a larger loaf.  The cover was taken off for this final quarter hour.

 This ugly loaf is my 3rd attempt at Desem

Results:
This is a spectacularly ugly loaf.  The folds unfolded, leaving the loaf with ugly crevasses throughout.

I have tasted some this morning, however, and it tastes fine -- and unbelievably, it is still fairly moist, or at least, not as dense as some of the stale ends of loaves that I have hanging around.  All in all, I'm impressed with the loaf's possibilities.  Although I think that the crust has suffered somewhat from the uneven baking.

Thanks
Today is Thanksgiving Day in the U.S., and I have a lot of friends and relatives celebrating over there.  For us in Canada, Thanksgiving has come and gone, and anyway it is not such a huge event here as it is in the South.  But today, as I eat my Desem bread, despite all its ugliness and mistakes, I think of my friends, and give thanks for them; and I try, for this moment at least, to be grateful for the food that has come into my hands.

After all, any loaf you can eat when you are done baking cannot be a total failure.

 My desem bread crumb: crust reveals an uneven baking

 But it tastes fine

 And it slices evenly

Notes to Myself

• Do it over.  Too many mistakes to know where to begin.
• Give thanks for every bite.

A Tale of Two Sourdoughs: Desem, a whole wheat sourdough

Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book's Desem (Whole Wheat Sourdough)

This blog entry completes the 'Tale of Two Sourdoughs' cycle, a comparison of two very different sourdoughs, one made with rye and the other made with wheat.

Part 1: Arva Flour Mill supplies my grain
Part 2: Nils' Schöner's Sourdough Method for rye


This method of whole wheat sourdough creation is one of the strangest I have seen, but the glowing reports of the bread made with it leaves one with such curiosity, I just had to try it. 

Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book (LKBB) has an entire chapter devoted to whole wheat breads, and all other breads in this chapter take up pp 79-108; the desem technique for dough, basic bread and other desem recipes occupy the second half of this chapter, pp 109-133.  Therefore, one can readily see the importance of the Desem bread, even without the many accolades that the book places on the bread's unique taste.

I was making this sourdough at the same time I was making the Rye Sourdough, and I must say that this entire methodology is completely different and utterly strange to me.  But it was fun, too.  Although there are a lot of pictures here, it mostly just shows how the desem develops, over time; it doesn't really show here what it might be capable of.  This page does have a couple of links to the first and second breads I made with it, though.


Day 1, I started with 3 c of wheat berries to make 2 c of freshly milled whole wheat flour (292g), and 1/2 c of water (109g).  I kneaded it and rounded it; and I must say that this dough ball is extremely dry and tight, and difficult to knead at this point.  The next part is a bit strange too: this dough ball gets buried in some whole wheat flour, with 4 inches of whole wheat flour on each side, for 48 hours, at a pretty cool temperature.  I found a place in our basement, beneath the fruit cellar jars, that stayed at about 60 degrees F., well within the 50-65 degree F range required.

 I get my wheat berries from Arva Flour Mills

 Several cups of wheat berries to mill

 Into the hopper

 Pour the grains in

 Take off your sweater before you start grinding, you will heat up

 If you milled it too coarsely, you can always run it through the mill again

 Not your average run of the mill grain

 As the miller said, 'That's fine'

 Measure out three cups

 Doesn't look like much yet, but the yeasts are in there

 As soon as you add water, they will start to arouse

 This is still pretty coarse, you have to knead it into shape

 That is one dry piece of coarse dough

 I fill half a tub with whole wheat flour (milled by Arva Flour Mills)

 I pour some of my own freshly milled flour on top

 Place my hard ball of desem in the whole wheat flour

 Cover it with more of my own freshly milled whole wheat flour

 And cover that with more of the whole wheat flour milled at Arva Flour Mills

 This gets covered

And it is kept at a controlled, very cool temperature for a couple of days.

Day 2, just leave it alone, don't touch it.  Maybe make sure the temperature hasn't changed, that's all.

Wait

Day 3, take your hard dough ball from where it was buried, and cut away the hardest crust -- and more -- until you have just half of what you started with.  For me, my desem ball weighed in at 384g, so I peeled it like an apple until I had 192g of still fairly hard dough.  To this, I was to add 1 cup of freshly ground whole wheat flour, which I measured out to be 116g; and I added 1/4 c of water, which I measured to be 56g.  Softening the desem ball in the meagre amount of water, I then kneaded the ball and incorporated the whole wheat flour.  The whole thing gets stuck back into the middle of a pail full of whole wheat flour for another day.

 Mill some grain and measure the flour and water

 Find your desem in the middle of the flour barrel and pull it out

 Measure it and peel off the hard crust

 Soften the desem in water

 Add some flour, mix it up, and knead it into a new ball

 Cover it back up in the barrel of whole wheat flour 

and let it sit covered again

Day 4, I repeated what I did on day 3.  This time, I measured my Desem at 350g, so half of that was 175g.  I cup of whole wheat flour today measured to be 122 g, and the water I used was 50g.  But today, the whole dough ball I was kneading seemed a whole lot softer.

 Dig out the desem, weight it, peel it, and keep half

 Moisten it in water, and add more flour

 

 Mix it, knead it, make another ball with it

 Bury it in flour again

 Cover it and wait

Day 5, you repeat what you did on day 3 and 4.  Here, my desem was 348g.  So today I peeled away the hard crust until I had 174g, and I added the same amounts of whole wheat flour and water that I had the day previously.  Every day, the desem is looser, less hard, less crusty.

 Grind some flour to have it ready, fetch the desem, weigh it

 peel the desem, use half, and add the appropriate amount of flour

 Measure the water, soak the desem, add the flour, mix it, knead it

 Cover it up again in the flour barrel

 Cover it and wait

Day 6.  Now the thing is so sloppy, it gets a bit difficult to get it all out of the container intact.  Now we are to soften the entire mass in 1/3 c of water (67g) and 1 c of whole wheat flour (142g).  And this time, we do not bury it in our whole wheat container, but we are to store it in a closed crock. 

 Measure the flour

 Dig out the sloppy desem

 Put it in the crock

 Add water

 Add flour

 Mix it

 Knead it

 Return it to the closed crock

Day 7.  Now things get really interesting.  Again, we soften the whole mass with 1/3 c water (82g) and add 1 c of whole wheat flour (142g).  Then after mixing it, you knead for 10 minutes or 300 strokes.  When I did this, I found it to be very sticky, and I had to put some water on my hand several times.  But when I was done, I measured the mass to be 994g. 

We are told to divide the entire mass into 4 parts and return 1 part to the crock; the other 3 parts will be used in bread baking the next day.   The desem that I returned to the crock weighed 249g.

Now, I had been making this desem each day of my vacation, and by day 7 we were going to head off to a cottage up north for a few days.  I couldn't take my mill with me, so I had to take a few days worth of flour with me -- along with my various desem containers, and books, notes and other bread making paraphernalia.  Who knew what sorts of things the cottage would have, to allow me to make this bread?

 Mill enough for the trip

 Desem seems to like its new home in the crock

 put it in a bowl

 soften in water

 mix it

 knead it

 Measure it and remove 1/4 to reserve as desem

 The 3/4 part will be used to bake with, tomorrow.

 Take all of this stuff with you to the cottage

Day 8.  Okay, we are now into the second week of this desem.  LKBB says that the desem is already viable and can raise dough, although it also says that it won't be particularly strong until the desem gets refreshed several times.  So today, the first day we were at the cottage, I was to do two things: (1) continue building the desem, and (2) bake the first loaves of bread with the desem that I spent the last week building.

(1) Building the desem.  There are several different ways to do this; LKBB suggests that you should bake bread daily with it, this second week, so that you can see the way the sourdough changes its ability to raise the dough.  But this was going to be problematic for me, being so far away from my home kitchen.  I opted instead for one of the alternatives: I would feed the desem (which contains 1 c of flour already) daily with 1/3 c of flour (the last day 1 c), so that by the end of the second week, my desem would have in it 4 c of flour.  Each time I feed it, I was to first soften it in water with an amount of water slightly less than 1/2 the amount of flour, and knead it for 10 minutes.

 1/3 c of water, or slightly less

 soften up the desem in the water

 1/3 c of the flour I milled yesterday

 Mix it

 knead it

crock it

On day 8, I therefore added 49g of whole wheat flour, and 34g of water; LKBB uses volume measures for the desem recipe, not weight measures; so my 1/3 c measure measured my whole wheat, and I eyeballed the water amount by filling up the same measure about half-way.

November Sunrise over Groom Lake near Kearney Ontario: time to bake!

(2) Here is a record of my first desem leavened loaf, baked in the cottage at Kearney Ontario.


Day 9.  Still at Kearney.  Still adding 1/3 c of whole wheat flour, and slightly less than that, by volume, in water, daily.  This is an extremely wet and sticky dough at this stage.  Thinking that this might be because I was adding too much water, I refused to wet my hands this day, as I kneaded.  1/3 c flour is 51g; 1/2 that volume in water is 22g today, by my 'eyeballing method'.

Man that is gooey: wondering if I'm adding too much water

Day 10.  Still at Kearney, but today we are heading home.  Not until I add 1/3 c of whole wheat flour, and half that amount by volume in water.    Flour is 48g, water is 28g.

I do my best to knead this, but it is really overly wet

Day 11.  Home from the cottage, but today I have to go to work.  Before I leave at 0620, I eat breakfast, make lunch, do the three S's, and also, now, feed the desem.  38g of water, 51g of flour.

Still very wet

Day 12.  Work again.  Feed desem again.  31g water, 50g of flour.

Still wet, though I'm trying to be careful not to add too much water

Day 13.  Work again.  Desem gets fed 52g flour, 30g water.

Still wet

Day 14.  Day off.  In anticipation of baking tomorrow, today I feed the desem 1 c of flour.  I am also to add 1/2 c of water, or enough to make it slightly sticky after 10 minutes of kneading.  I have the water ready, but I only wet my hands with it.  I do not need to incorporate it.  The water content of the desem is, and probably has been, too high all this week.   I divide the desem by weight into quarters, and reserve 1/4 for next week's feeding schedule.  The other three quarters I set aside for tomorrow's baking.  

 This time I use no water at all, and the dough comes together without requiring any water

 I save 1/4 of my desem by weight for the crock, to continue feeding daily

3/4 of the desem is set aside from the crock to bake with tomorrow

Day 15.  Another baking day.  That means two things to do again:

(1) Refresh the desem.  As long as you have got some whole wheat flour already milled, this takes very little time.  Am I tired of doing it yet?

No, not really.  But the tasks are quite repetitive.  No point in making more pictures.  Refreshing the desem this week will be much the same as refreshing it last week -- only, hopefully I won't make it too wet this coming week.

What I am tired of is writing about it.  And fighting with the stupid word-processor which continuously insists on changing 'desem' to 'deism'.   It wasn't until I wrote that sentence that, realizing the level of my frustration, I learned how to teach Mac's TextEdit how to learn the word.  Arggh.  That was too easy.

Edit -> Spelling and Grammar -> Show Spelling and Grammar -> Learn
       
(2) Bake my second desem loaf.