A Fermenting Story - JT's 85 x 3

John Tredgold (JT) is a member of Bread Bakers Guild Team USA 2010 (Baguette and Specialty Breads section).  He shared his [b]85 x 3[/b] formula from the Breads Draft Class at the California Culinary Academy in San Francisco back in February.  I first read about this beautiful recipe at MC’s farine.com (please click [b]here[/b] for her wonderful post.  JT is Director of Bakery Operations at Semifreddi's in San Francisco Bay Area.  Founders of Semifreddi’s are German descents.) 

Basically, JT’s formula is a story of fermenting, employing three types of pre-ferments: biga, poolish, and levain, and using a specialty flour containing 0.85% ash content (Central Milling’s Organic Artisan Old Country Type 85 Malted Flour).  This is a high extraction flour, about 82 – 85% rate of extraction of wheat berries.  It is roughly equivalent to the French T80 flour which normally has ash content ranging from 0.75% to 0.90% according to Prof. Calvel’s [i]The Taste of Bread[/i], page 4.

I recently came across a South Australian organic miller, Four Leaf Milling, which produces an 85% Light Flour.  This flour is derived from whole wheat by removing approximately 15% of the bran.  I am in the process of finding out more information about it, but in the mean time I thought I would use my French T110 flour to try JT’s formula.  The French T110 flour generally has higher ash content (1.00 – 1.20%) and higher rate of extraction (85 – 90%).

For JT’s formula, please click on this [b]link[/b] to his spreadsheets, provided in MC blog above.  Thank you, MC, for a most inspiriting post.

I attempted this formula three times.  Each time I scaled his formula down to 5% for a 1 kg loaf.  Below were the photos of my sourdoughs.  I did not use any commercial yeasts as in JT’s formula.  For the portion that uses white bread flour, I used Australia’s Laucke’s unbleached bakers flour which has the same protein count as that of King Arthur's All Purpose flour (ie. 11.9%), which JT uses for his formula.

JT’s formula provided 1 1/2 hours first fermentation at roughly the dough temperature of 75 F (or 23.9C), and 1 1/2 – 2 hours proof at 75 – 80F (or 23.9 – 26.7C).

(1) The following bread was done with three hours bulk fermentation at 20 C and six hours proof at the cool overnight room temperature of 15 – 20C.

The flavour of this bread is exceptional.  As I took my first bite, the rich aroma hit me.  As I chewed, the flavour  continued to unfold and deepen.   All else being equal, I attributed this rich flavour to the favourable climate for making slow rise levain bread.  In Australia (or should I say, in Queensland where the winter is mild), the best time for making levain bread has arrived!

(2) The following bread was done with four hours bulk fermentation at 20 C and proof retard in the refrigerator overnight (10 hours).

(3) The following bread was done with four hours bulk fermentation at 20 C and two hours proof at the room temperature of approx. 22 C.  (The crumb shot below shows that the dough could do with a slightly longer proofing time as my temperature was a lot lower than that provided by JT.  On the other hand, this loaf had the highest volume due to the under-proof.)

I must be a person who is easily moved by people whose passion I can recognize.  I see in JT what I have seen in Gerard Rubaud.   I may be wrong, but some passionate pursuits are lone business.  

Shiao-Ping