After seeing Renee's and Lin's achievements with crumble bigas, I wanted to try them again. I was especially interested in the one that used both a biga and a poolish, between them including all the flour.
I decided to work with the most difficult flour I have, a stone-ground whole wheat pastry flour made by Snavely's Mill. They only sell wholesale; a local discount grocery bought some 50 lb bags and broke them down into 4-lb sacks, which is how I got mine. The flour has a good taste in baked goods but being a pastry flour is really tough to make a decent loaf from. I have found that a mix of half the WW and half King Arthur bread flour works better and tastes good, but still doesn't make for great breads. I thought this flour should make for a good stress test for a crumble biga.
I decided to use all the WW flour in the biga and all the white flour in the poolish. The poolish would be at 100% hydration and the biga at 45%, as Renee and Lin have suggested. Of course, 45% might not be the best value for this particular WW, but we have to start somewhere. I couldn't make all the hydrations work out with exactly equal amounts of the two flours, and the WW ended up being about 58% of the total.
Target flour: 300g
target hydration: 68%
Biga
------
- 175g - WW pastry stone-ground sifted #30 screen
- 79g - water
- 0.25 - tsp yeast
Poolish
--------
- 125g - bread flour
- 125g - water
- 0.25 tsp - yeast
Add salt at final mix.
Overall hydration: (79 + 125)/(175 + 125) = 68%
From my notes:
Making the crumble biga: I poured all 79g of water into a glass baking dish and sprinkled the yeast over it. Then I added 79g of the WW flour and stirred it in gently with a small spatula. At this point the mix was quite wet, of course. Then I added the rest of the flour and started to work it in without working it too much (since one goal is to get minimal gluten development). I ended up working the dough gently by hand, much like working butter into the flour for biscuits. This worked well and did not get my hands very covered with dough. I took a picture of the crumbled biga at this point.
Here I made a radical change from what everyone has suggested:
I put both preferments into a proofer at 80°F. I fermented the poolish for 5 hours, It seemed nicely active, with many bubbles. I removed it to the counter. I kept the biga at 80°F for a total of 6 hours; I couldn't really detect any activity. Here is a picture of the biga at this point,
Then I combined the two preferments.
The biga was very dry, and next time I would spray it with water at the start of fermentation. Combining and getting the lumps out was hard. I repeatedly squeezed the dough through my hand and eventually got the two components fairly smooth but still not completely uniform. I waited 1 1/2 hours then kneaded them in the bowl. After kneading the dough seemed a little wet, somewhat sticky, and not very strong nor elastic.
After half an hour, I did a shear-lamination style stretching session. After another 1/2 hour, S&Fs in the bowel. At this point the dough seemed dry, tacky not sticky, and was strong and elastic. It felt like a more conventional dough after 3 - 4 S&F sessions. After another 30 - 40 minutes the dough had risen nearly double and I shaped it into a log. Proofed free-standing for ~ 1 hour. It was too late to bake so I put the loaf covered with plastic wrap into the fridge for overnight.
The baking schedule was devised to keep the surface of the loaf relatively cool as long as possible; the loaf being cold from the fridge would help; I suspected that the WW pastry flour wouldn't support much oven spring. So the plan was to preheat the oven to a lower temperature than usual and then to boil the baking steel to give it more heat.
9 hours later I preheated the oven to ~410°F. Then I broiled the baking steel for 6 - 7 minutes and turned the temperature setting down to 300°F. I took the loaf out of the fridge just before broiling the steel and kept it covered, Slashed, and baked with steam for 13 minutes then reset temperature to 410°F. The loaf was finished in only 25 minutes with the interior temperature 207°F, the crust hard to a tap, and the color a medium shade of yellow-brown. The bottom was lighter in color, suggesting that I could have broiled the steel longer.
The finished loaf had risen but not enough to open the scores very much. It felt on the dense side to heft. The crumb was not very open but not really dense either. The crumb had a soft mouth feel. The flavor was very mellow with a pleasant richness and a hint of almost an EEVO-like flavor even though no oil had been used.
I sliced the loaf when it was still warm and that shows up in the image of the crumb. The bread was soft and mellow with a mildly rich flavor. The crust was thin with a little crunch. Overall, an acceptable but not great loaf. Perhaps this is a good as it gets with this flour.
By comparison, here is a crumb shot of a yeasted loaf I made with the same flour, where I used 90% WW, 10% masa harina, and added an egg for more structure:
- tpassin's Blog
- Log in or register to post comments
That doesn't look like a bad loaf Tom. Not bad crumb even if not like Lin's and the flavour sounds good too.
I know Lin doesn't leave the biga for the full 24h but I think yours needed a little longer than the 6h. It doesn't look fully mature too my eyes.
The crumbles need to get a little puffy and shiny but it's the smell that tells you it's ready. Should be like over ripe fruit but fresh, not overly acidic and with no hint of a flour smell. It's a very particular smell which I've only smelt with biga.
You going to give it another try? Sounds like for that flour the result is not bad.
Yes, I will have another go. I think the biga was too dry. I couldn't tell if it had really done much fermenting. The poolish clearly had. Perhaps I should have refrigerated the poolish until the biga had shown more signs of development. I had been hoping to bake the same day, hence pushing at 80 deg F, but I ended up having to retard anyway.
Next time I think I will skip the poolish and just add some more yeast when combining everything. That will let me add the rest of the water to the biga and let it sit until it is better hydrated.
I learned to treat the crumbly biga like biscuit/scone dough when mixing it up. That was a good lesson.
I'm hoping that I will learn something helpful for Katie by experimenting with this flour, since its protein is on the weak side, but I think hers is lower quality. My flour seems to be good quality for what it is. When mine runs out I probably won't be able to get any more.
And it seemed to have tasted quite nice too. I would be very keen to see how it turns out for you again, with the mods you've mentioned above. I suppose you do cover the biga when it's fermenting? It should be dry when it's done, and if it feels very difficult to mix in, just let it sit in the poolish for a while (if you will use the poolish again). If not, I usually just let it soak for 10-15 mins in however much water still has to go into the final dough.
Another thing you might consider: pour in all the flour for the biga into the water at one go and simply rub it like apple crumble. If it is first mixed like a poolish and then the remaining flour is then added, I think you will end up with a lot more lumps and development. That makes the mixing the next day extremely difficult.
Combining a biga and a IDY poolish seems to create a nice combination of taste and loft for the flours I'm using. A biga loaf gives complexity and flexibility, e.g. a 100% biga loaf, but the combination loaf gives a flavourful, rich and airy crumb I've not had till now.
That's just how I made the biga this time. I added the yeast to the water, waited a little, then added the flour all at once. As I broke down the bigger clumps I realized that the way I was working with the mixture was much like for biscuits/scones. If there had been too much water, that wouldn't have worked well.
Yes, both biga and poolish were covered. And yes, the biga felt and looked dry at the end. I did leave the poolish sitting on top of the biga after I realized it didn't want to mix in, but it didn't seem to soak in very well
I've never been sure I understand why fermenting all the flour before combining and doing bulk fermentation works well. I would think it tends to use up much of the ingredients that the yeast feed on before bulk even begins. OTOH, hydrated dough event without yeast makes for better tasting bread the longer it sits around - I mean, the bread is made after getting some leavening into that aged unleavened dough in some way. One way I have done this is to make a leavened dough and an unleavened one with the same hydration, and combine them after the leavened one has fermented. This might be overnight, for example. I have gotten some seriously good tasting bread this way. But it's difficult to combine the two parts together by hand.
Maybe part of the benefits of using a poolish in addition to the biga is this hydration effect.
I looked back at a lengthy convo on here about the biga in 2024. I evidently liked it at the time according to my posts at that time.
I’ve moved on to my simple method with as little fuss as possible. I hope you can figure it out. Your loaf has a lovely crumb. c
It seems Tom that you've managed to achieve the fabled good flavour, I'd be interested to read about your further tries and what you do decide to do.
Quite radical working with the weak flour too.
I do think the Italians are on to something with the 16 hours at 16 or so degrees C for the biga. Of course we are taking our own liberties and making the method our own, but my thinking is that perhaps if I was given a choice between a long cold biga and one with a short warm biga and then an overnight in the fridge, the better bread might be from the former?
However, with all humility I'm not claiming to very good at the biga method as you can see from my other posts and comments, so perhaps I'm barking up the wrong tree here.
Looking forward to the next instalment and your usual quality writing and baking.
-Jon