RLB's Sourdough Wheat with(out) Seeds

Singular bakes are those that purportedly follow a recipe but, in reality, have little in common with the original by the end of the process. It happens a lot, for one reason or another.

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Began with Rose Levy Berenbaum's Sourdough Wheat Bread with Seeds from The Bread Bible (p. 466).

Problem: I was basically out of seeds, and the store near me only had roasted/salted... I prefer to start with unroasted, unsalted.

So I replaced the pumpkin/sunflower/sesame/flax/polenta mix with a 7-grain cereal mix I had on hand.

Big change #2: I used a soaker, which RLB doesn't do here, and then tried to improvise some changes to compensate for the water in the soaker.

And lastly, my shaping left something to be desired, and scoring really didn't come through at all. I don't do batards/ovals/torpedos all that often -- something to work on.

The good news: flavor was still very good, crumb wasn't bad - is supposed to be denser - and there was clearly some good rise, even though I was working with straight levain as the yeast agent in a 50% WW dough. So some successes to count.

All changes to ingredients are below, roughly.

• 280 g starter
• 500 g water
• Soaker:
  • 7-grain cereal mix = 100 g
  • Water for soaker = 95 g
• 10 g bran
• 8 g germ
• 29 g salt

Truly a singular bake in that I probably couldn't recreate this if I tried.

Loaf one was proofed in an oval banneton and baked in the open on a stone (no cover). It definitely had the best structure and rise.

The second was proofed without support and baked in an oval dutch oven.