Filoncino Integrale and another LA car chase

Since The Wednesday Chef posted the "no-knead" bread recipe from Jim Lahey, it reminded me of one of my favorite bread books: Dunway's No Need to Knead. The focaccia alone makes the book worth owning but I haven't tried many of the other recipes so that's what I did this weekend.



While many of her recipe's are extremely quick (just check out the subtitle of the book), this is one that is a pseudo-sourdough. It starts with a biga or sponge.

Filoncino Integrale:

Biga:

1/2 cup whole wheat flour
1/2 cup rye flour
1/2 teaspoon active dry yeast (and right now Costco has 2lb bags of Red Star yeast if you haven't noticed)
1 cup lukewarm water

Mix all of the ingredients in a bowl and cover tightly. Place in a warm location overnight. In the morning, it looks like this:



Dough:

1.25 cups lukewarm water
2 teaspoons active dry yeast
1 cup of the biga (used nearly all of what I had but not quite all if you like to feed and save starter)
4 cups unbleached bread flour
2 teaspoons salt
3/4 cups whole wheat flour
2 teaspoons olive oil
1 teaspoon kosher or coarse sea salt

Mix the water and the yeast in a large mixing bowl until the yeast is dissolved
Stir in the biga
Add 2.5 cups of the bread flour and the salt and stir until smooth
Add the remaining bread flour and the whole wheat flour and stir until smooth and the dough pulls away from the sides of the bowl

Cover the bowl and let rise until doubled in size (~30-45 minutes)

Fold the dough a few times to allow the yeast to rest, cover again and proof a second time for another 30-45 minutes and it looks something like this:



Preheat the oven to 500F and grease a three-loaf baguette pan.
Slowly pour the dough into each slot, stopping to cut the dough in thirds (be very gentle here to not squish the nice bubbles out)
Brush the tops with olive oil and sprinkle with the salt
Allow the loaves to proof for 15-20 minutes (if you were rough with the dough, you will need much more time as I learned the hard way)

Reduce heat to 425F and bake for 20 minutes.

Now I don't own a baguette pan so I tried to form the dough into a single loaf. In doing so I really mashed the dough more than I should have. In retrospect I should have let the loaf proof for at least half an hour. Since I didn't, I suspect the loaf I got was much more dense than if I had followed the directions or given the loaf more time to rise. It does make a great sandwich though!



Here's a close up of the crumb so you can see that it's a bit more dense than one might wish.



Dunaway starts the recipe out by saying that she does not like traditional San Francisco sourdoughs and that this recipe does not aim for that effect despite the use of a biga. My thought was that she might like the French style of sourdough which is much less tart but she never mentions it in her book. I couldn't tell that there was any natural yeast in this bread at all. The crust was pretty tasty though.

The big "advance" that Jim Lahey promotes is baking bread in a large cast iron dutch oven. He claims that this method traps the steam generated by baking similar to brick ovens. Since a little bird suggested I might be getting just such a dutch oven this holiday season, I'll try that with Dunaway's recipes (and try this bread again while giving it more time to proof) and report back.