Atta Flour - Yes, You Can (continued)!
Continuing on with bread made with atta flour (see my previous post at https://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/74124/atta-flour-yes-you-can), here's a loaf with a few changes. As a reminder, this atta flour is a whole-wheat flour called "Sujata Chakki Atta", which is very finely ground, so finely that even much of the bran will pass through a #50 screen. This screen only removes around 5% of the weight of the flour. This is a brand from General Mills India.
What was different this time -
- Didn't sift out the bran;
- Slightly unusual bulk ferment schedule;
- Stretched the dough much less during shaping.
- Made a batarde instead of a boule.
Let's see the pictures first, then I'll go over the changes.
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I didn't sift out the bran because there was so little of it, and it was so fine, that I suspected it wouldn't affect the gluten development. That seems to have been about right.
There were 300g of (unfermented) flour, 80% of which was the atta flour and 20% was King Arthur bread flour. The 100% hydration starter was 90g or 30%. Overall hydration was 81% including the starter ingredients.
The bulk ferment was started late, yet I wanted to bake in the morning. Leaving it on the counter overnight would have been too long, and refrigerating it overnight would have entailed a long wait the next day for bulk ferment to finish. So I put the BF tub into the refrigerator after it had fermented about 4 hours, by which time it had started to rise but only a little. I took it out two hours later and went to bed. The dough fermented on the counter for 7 1/2 hours after that.
This was a little long, and the dough had at least tripled if not more, but I'm used to that. It hadn't collapsed but as you might expect, the dough was a little delicate. It was smooth, highly extensible and had basically no elasticity.
Normally I would have stretched the dough a lot and worked with it to develop its elasticity, but as an experiment I didn't do much of that this time. The idea was that the extensibility could lead to good oven spring as long as the dough could hold its shape during proof. It turned out that's what happened, as the pictures show. The loaf proofed free-standing for 1 1/4 hours, the last 10 minutes uncovered.
The baking schedule was about the same as for the previous loaf. The loaf expanded beautifully, made a good ear, and the crumb is quite decently open for an 80% whole wheat bread. The flavor is rich and wheaty, with a subtle tang from the long bulk ferment that I can barely detect but makes my mouth water as I chew a slice.
These atta loaves have been so good, and the dough so easy to work with, that I don't see any reason to use any other whole wheat flour (except perhaps if you need your flour to be labeled "organic").
TomP