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A couple of questions for you Melissa. First of all, I have a bag of whole kamut flour from Central Milling that needs to be used up. I have had it for probably a year, but have stored it mostly in the fridge. I know that whole grains are not meant for long storage. I do not detect any noticeable signs of spoilage when I give it the sniff test. Would it be obvious to me if it was rancid?
You mentioned that I would need to add a bit more milk to the recipe when using whole kamut. If I wanted to lighten it up a bit with about 50% bread flour, would that still hold true? Any other changes I would need to make?
thanks for your intriguing posts!
You’re welcome : )
I think your nose knows when it comes to rancidity, and if the flour smells good, it should be fine. If you’re worried though, you could make a couple pancakes/crepes to confirm before going down the bread road.
I think if you combine bread flour and whole Kamut, you’ll be able to use more liquid because the dough will be stronger from the bread flour. Maybe start with the recipe amount and add more if the dough feels dry. And 30-60 minutes in, add even more milk or water if you think the dough can handle it.
Thanks for your speedy reply and tips! I hate to waste flour, so will give it a go and see how it comes out.
So I followed the directions wrt refrigerating the dough after a near complete rise in the bread pan. I have pretty active starter and had gotten a beautiful rise. Unfortunately, it fell overnight in the fridge and two hours in the morning in the oven at “Proof“ temperature did nothing. So I now have a brick. It looks like it was over proofed or the sequence is wrong.
I’ve had great luck following the Danish baker Foodgeek’s process where are you refrigerate your sourdough as soon as it is shaped, and goes right into the oven from the refrigerator. I might try that next time or just bake as soon as it’s done with the final proof. My concern with the latter is that you don’t get a long fermentation, which is a hallmark of sourdough bread.
I also question the directions on timing of the final proof. There is no room for this amount of dough to double while just peaking over the rim of a 9 x 5 loaf pan. My dough was at least an inch over the rim of the pan in just an hour.
I’m so sorry to hear you ended up with a brick. It sounds like your dough over proofed, as you noted.
Once a dough is deflating like that, there is no more “food” left for it to re-rise. Your best bet is to put it in the oven ASAP.
It is very risky in the potential to waste a lot of flour but you could also treat it like a giant overripe starter, add fresh flour to it, knead it a bunch, shape two loaves, and let them expand again with the new food/flour.
It sounds like your pan might be smaller than the one used in the recipe? That one is 9x 5x 2.75 inches. You could scale the recipe ingredients down – e.g. a quarter reduction, you’d multiply them by 0.75.
Did you look at the pics in the photo gallery at the end of the recipe? They show the dough expansion at each stage.
If your starter is quite active or your room temperature very warm, another option is to use less sourdough starter. Then you will get the long ferment that you are seeking.
I’m having a go at this recipe, never sifted fresh milled flour before. That said, about the “high extraction” K flour in this recipe…
I milled Khorasan berries as if for HRS bread flour, sifted with a #50 screen and got about 50/50 ratio of extracted flour to discard (brand+). The discard had a lot of yellow in it so I re-milled on the same mill setting, re-sifted reducing the discard to about 1/3rd. Does the 70/30 ratio qualify as “high extraction” or is the 50/50 ratio more of a “high extraction”?
Suggestions?
I’m just going to check up on this but i’m thinking 75/25? Don’t know why, perhaps I dreamt it, but I seem to recall it is half wholemeal and half 50:50 (strange way for me to remember it) which would make it 75/25.
EDIT: if you are sifting at home then it’s just a matter of sifting out the more coarse bran. If you are not sifting and have wholegrain flour and bread flour then mixing 75-80% wholegrain flour with 25-20% bread flour approximates high extraction.
I think Breadtopia’s high extraction flours are 83-88%, depending on the wheat variety.
White flour is usually 72% extraction.
Thank you. Even at 75% extraction there was still a lot of Khorasan yellow in the discard.
Now that I think on it more, years ago I tried sifting durum flour that I milled, and it wasn’t anything like when I’ve sifted red and white wheats. The bran wasn’t so much in flakes that were capturable by the seive I was using. Durum and khorasan are closely related, both hard and tetraploids (28 chromosomes). They mill similarly…
I don’t have suggestion or solution for saving more of the khorasan endosperm, just commenting 
because I’m in the midst of an experiment with these flours actually.
Here’s a little preview:
I mill and sift durum in different grades, from coarse to very fine, as it’s commonly used in Italian and Mediterranean baking and cooking.
I start by grinding it very coarsely (coarser than I need) and sifting it through a #50 sieve, I get a dark, fine flour with lots of bran. Subsequent grinds at different finenesses make the flour lighter in color.
Unlike other flours, most of the bran is in the first finer flour. This could be a starting point for trying to get a high extraction flour with this type of wheat.
Thanks! I will give this a try.
I tried your suggestion. It is easier to see the brand in bigger pieces on top of the screen. However, the return was only 15% (by weight) coming through the screen. I proceeded to put the stuff on top of the screen through the mill a total of 3 more times, sifting between each grind. I finished with 76% flour, 24% discard. Doing the first milling at a larger setting makes it easier to see the stuff I don’t want but also creates the necessity of an an additional milling.
I didn’t mention the bran on top because it was a long time ago and I was grinding corn at the same time using a similar procedure and wasn’t sure if it was the durum or the corn. You have probably milled at a coarser setting.
I haven’t had a chance to do it again, but I’m going to mill it again soon. In the meantime, I’ve been trying to get more information on durum flours and now I have more sieves than the three I had. It’s something I’m still learning, including high extraction. I’ll keep your experience in mind.
Milling durum and corn in gradual steps and sifting with different sieves is something I’ll always do to get three calibrated granulometries. Since there is only the generic name semolina in English, I use the Italian terminology for the different grades: semola (for pasta, gnocchi, Spanish migas de harina), semolino (mostly for gnocchi alla romana), and farina rimacinata (breads). Same thing, but different names with corn.
