The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book_ A Guide to Whole-Grain Breadmaking - Laurel Robertson [39]
Baking Bread with a New Desem
2 ¼ cups desem (has 3 cups flour)
1 ⅓ to 1 ½ cups cool unchlorinated water (315 to 355 ml)
3 cups flour (450 g)
2 ½ teaspoons salt (14 g)
The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and the proof of the desem is, too. You will want to bake bread after the first week to get an idea how your desem is faring. Even though the bread will not be light yet, its flavor should be wonderful.
When the desem is very young it doesn’t have nearly the power that it will later on, and so at first you will need to plan for a longer fermentation time and a larger proportion of desem than you will need later on.
MIXING THE DOUGH
Soften the desem in the 1 ⅓ cups of water. Stir the salt into the flour. Mix with the water and desem, adding additional water or flour as necessary to make a slightly stiff dough. Allow a few minutes before you make the final adjustment of consistency. The dough should be softer than the desem itself but slightly stiffer than ordinary pan dough, so that when you squeeze it you don’t have to strain, but you do feel the muscles in your fingers working.
KNEADING
Knead the dough well, about 20 minutes or 600 strokes by hand, about 10 minutes with a dough hook on slow speed. Continue until the dough becomes stretchy and strong. In our experience it is easy to underknead desem dough by hand, and easy to overknead it with a machine. Notice that desem dough made with coarse flour feels dry to the touch when you first mix it up, but as kneading progresses, it begins to feel sticky: this is somewhat the opposite of what happens with ordinary doughs. After you finish kneading, the surface should be smooth and shiny, slightly sticky to the touch.
Set the dough in a bowl large enough to allow it to expand slightly—about a four-quart capacity would do. Cover the top of the bowl with a platter or plastic, and set it in a draft-free place at cool room temperature, about 65° to 70°F, for eight to ten hours.
FERMENTATION OR RISING PERIOD
During the eight to ten hours, the desem dough may scarcely rise up—this is quite normal. If convenient, deflate or punch the dough some time around the last hour or so; this invigorates the leavening organisms.
The dough has now finished its cool fermentation and is ready for its warm final rise. During this next stage, the surface will lose its shine and stickiness and become dry to the touch. This is ripe dough.
As time passes and your desem grows stronger, you will shorten the rising time until finally it takes just 4 hours for this first, cool part of its rise. You can gauge how much time you need by evaluating the dough for ripeness as described above.
When the rising period is finished, follow the instructions for shaping, proofing, and baking given in the full Desem Bread Recipe.
TASTE THE BREAD
If the bread you make is as good as it really ought to be, you can be sure it will get more delicious and lighter with every baking from now on. But what if it isn’t? Maybe your flour is the culprit: a desem can only be as good as the wheat from which it was made. A couple of our testers made desems that were acrid and sour, with no leavening power; we finally traced the problem to their wheat. If the wheat is damaged or has been treated with chemicals, the kind and number of organisms it harbors will be adversely affected. So far as we know, there is no way to find out before you try making the desem. If it tastes really terrible to you and you didn’t let the starter get too warm at any stage, the flour was bad, and at this point there’s no rescuing the desem because it isn’t there. Please do try again with better