Jonathan Kandell wrote:
Take old dough(from previous mix), make a preferment with it adding
flour and water to it (100 flour, 40 old dough, about 60water) making
it a tight dough.
Leave it for about an hour to proove.
Then mix the main dough, using:
100 flour T80 (a fine wholemeal. If no T80 available, I guess you can
just sieve wholemeal flour)
2 coarse sea salt
30 preferment


Are the numbers grams or baker's percentages?

Hmmm..given that the numbers above total 332, that would be a rather
small loaf. Considering that the Poilane miche is supposed to be two
kilograms, I'd have to guess the numbers would be bakers percentages.
It is also interesting that there is neither yeast nor water in the
final dough. Old dough is usually a yeasted process, and the yeast has
to come from somewhere! Also, there isn't enough water in the
pre-ferment to adequately hydrate the dough.

Let's assume we are shooting for 80% hydration, which is reasonable for
a whole wheat bread. (also, if you grind your own wheat with a
micronizer mill, sifting probably won't help - the particles are too
uniform to sift well.) Instead of sifting the whole wheat flour, one
could also dilute it with some all-purpose or bread flour. All-purpose
is probably closer to a classic French flour, so mixing about 80% whole
wheat and 20% all-purpose would be close enough. Since some of the
water will come from the preferment, I'll drop the amount of water to
about 76%. It's close enough for bread making.

Finally, the yeast. How much to use? I'd guess is about .3% instant
yeast, again, as a bakers percentage.

To make a two kilogram loaf with that recipe, try:

Preferment:
144 grams Flour
58 grams Old Dough
86 grams Water

Final dough:
960 grams Flour
19 grams Salt
730 grams Water
288 grams Preferment
3 grams Instant Yeast

If anyone tries it, I'd appreciate hearing how it turned out. I'm not
sure when I'll be able to try it.

A few more interesting observations..... Bernard Clayton has a recipe
that was approved by Pierre Poilane, the father of Lionel, that was a
straight dough - no sourdough, no old dough, no poolish. Also no spelt,
and little whole wheat. If you go to their web site, they tell you they
use 30% spelt (it isn't clear if that is a bakers percentage or a more
conventional percentage) and a sourdough process. It seems that there
are a number of hints about the Poilane formula, and that they are all
different.

Mike


--
Mike Avery mavery at mail dot otherwhen dot com
part time baker ICQ 16241692
networking guru AIM, yahoo and skype mavery81230
wordsmith

Once seen on road signs all over the United States:
Spread it on
And lightly too
Shave it off
That's all
You're through
Burma-Shave