My question is about the hydration of freshly milled Red Fife flour. I recently purchased whole grain Red Fife and Yecora Rojo flours from Breadtopia. I first used the Red Fife flour in Peter Reinhart’s Whole Grain Breads 100% Whole Wheat Sandwich recipe. The instructions are creating a biga with half the flour and yeast at 75% hydration, another half of the flour in a soaker with milk and salt at 87% hydration. The final dough is assembled with more yeast, fat, sweetener, and additional flour. Final hydration is 72%. I have been using this biga/soaker method for several months with good success.
I found the hydration to be much too high when using the Red Fife flour compared to the King Arthur whole wheat or white whole wheat flours I had been using. The dough was very slack (but had a proper windowpane) and I needed to add a significant amount of extra flour to get a somewhat workable dough; final hydration was ≈63%.
The flour had been milled a few days before I recieved it and used it. Two weeks later, I baked another loaf using a lower starting hydration. The dough was more workable and the final hydration was ≈58%.
Is the behavior of the Red Fife flour due to the nature of Red Fife flour, the fact that it was freshly milled, or some other reason?
Will the Yecora Rojo flour behave similarly to the Red Fife?
Is this blog post when I used whole grain red fife flour only, the hydration I landed on was 75% and you can see the loaf wasn’t particularly tall and I probably could have gone lower with the hydration.
(The lead photo is 40% whole grain paired with bread flour. Click on the link to see the all red fife variation.)
I did that blog post a few years ago and wheat does change from harvest to harvest but I also wonder if perhaps your dough over-fermented? That can be a risk when you’re using fresher flour.
But it sounds like your dough was wet feeling from the get-go, as opposed to fine and then soupy, which would be over fermentation.
I do have red fife from this harvest season; I just haven’t used it at 100%, so I can’t really offer much more input.
Red Fife wheat is lower in gluten than commercial whole wheat flour, which is made from hard red spring wheat and which I believe can have additional gluten added to it.
Gluten strength will definitely impact how slack a dough feels.
I don’t think you’ll have the same experience with the Yecora Rojo. I find it to be a stronger wheat than Red Fife.
My 100% whole grain yecora rojo loaf was 88% hydration here:
Hi Jeffrey, if you’re interested I spent a month doing weekly bakes of 100% whole red fife sourdough. My whole red fife was purchased as flour so I’m not sure how freshly milled it was, however, it was from a small mill so likely was. I first started out thinking that since it is 100% whole grain that it would need to be highly hydrated so starting around 80+ % hydration I found my loaves were over hydrated and overproofed. I soon discovered that red fife isn’t very fermentation tolerant, a quality that someone I know who is very familiar with this grain confirmed. My suspicion is that red fife has higher proteolytic enzyme levels than most other flours, so if you allow the dough to get to a very low pH those enzymes will start to very quickly breakdown your gluten. Now I realize that you’re doing a commercial yeasted loaf so this won’t apply quite the same way, however it is something to think about.
Interestingly, my most successful loaf was my last one in which I greatly reduced the hydration down to 75% and allowed much less fermentation. I suspect based on the feel of that dough that the hydration could have been 1-2% higher and be perfect but for sure reducing the fermentation was useful.
I actually felt that red fife has good gluten and while developing the dough it felt quite strong, but as the pH falls that gluten starts to breakdown at a faster pace.
In any event I agree with you and Melissa it doesn’t absorb that much water even when used 100%.
Thank you for your reply. I did see your blog post on the Red Fife sourdough. How much difference would there be between the straight dough that I used for the sandwich bread and the sourdough? I found that even at 63% hydration, the dough would not hold its shape during bench rest before shaping into the pan loaf. At 58% hydration, the dough was much easier to shape and was more similar to what I experience with the King Arthur whole wheats.
Thanks!
Thank you for your detailed response. Your loaves look wonderful! I guess it was my incorrect assumption that wheat flours for bread (as opposed to pastry flour) would generally perform the same way. I will try the Yecora Rojo flour that I have and see if it behaves more like the flours I have been using. I’m out of Red Fife now anyway.
Hmmm maybe if the biga overfermented, that would be like using past ripe starter and could break down gluten in the final dough. I don’t think any other ingredients/elements of a sandwich loaf would cause the dough to feel so much wetter.
I’m tempted to try this and see how it goes.
I have Reinhart’s BBA (Bread Baker’s Apprentice) and there’s a recipe in it for whole grain sandwich bread. I wonder if it’s the same. It’s in cups and ounces. Is your recipe in grams? I’m gonna put it in grams.
for two loaves, but my pans are bigger than his so might scale it
Soaker (room temp overnight)
120g coarse whole grains
170g water
Poolish (2-4 hrs RT, then fridge overnight)
191g whole wheat flour
1/4 tsp instant yeast
170g water
Knead by hand, let rise approx 2 hrs (doubles), divide and shape, proof approx 1.5 hrs (doubles), mist and bake at 350F for 45-60 minutes. Rotating if needed. Hollow sound when thumped, remove from pans to cool.
447g liquid
556g flours
80% hydration ish (egg and honey aren’t quite water equivalents)
I appreciate your effort in helping me with this bake. The recipe in WGB is slightly different (total quantities in grams):
Biga:
227 g WW flour
1 g Instant yeast
170 g water (70–72 °F)
Knead for 2 min, rest 5 min, knead 1 min, then refrigerate 8–72 h)
Soaker:
227 g WW flour
4g salt
198 g milk or buttermilk
Combine, cover, and hold 8–24 h at room temperature
Final dough:
Soaker
Biga
57 g WW flour
5 g salt
6 g instant yeast
43 g honey or brown sugar
28 g butter or oil
Cut soaker and biga in 12 pieces and combine with other ingredients, stirring vigorously for 2 min. Knead for 3–4 min, rest 5 min, knead 1 min. Let rise 45–60 min until 1.5× in size. Shape into loaf and proof for 45–60 min until 1.5×. Place in oven preheated to 425 °F, reduce temperature to 350 °F, and bake for 40–50 min (195 °F final internal loaf temperature), rotating pan halfway through baking.
My experience was that I could tell right away that both the biga and soaker were much wetter than when I use King Arthur whole wheat flour. I had trouble kneading the biga because of more stickiness than usual. The flour did seem to have more activity than the KA flour and I may have overproofed on both loaves.
Thanks!
When I first got a mill and started down the whole grain breads path, I started with Red Fife and a Peter Reinhart recipe from that same book (though a different one, also not sourdough). I had the same experience of needing to reduce the hydration, and when I googled for confirmation, I found Anson mill’s adaptation of the very same recipe where they state the same thing: https://ansonmills.com/recipes/429?recipes_by=grain They also say the Red Fife wants less yeast than Reinhart’s recipe, which I followed and seemed also to work.
FWIW, the Red Fife I used was from breadtopia, which I milled myself.
Benito
Do you think that hydration tolerance changes with the season? I’ve always struggled in the summer. I am sure I must be over fermenting but wonder if I should hydrate less as well? I’m using tried and true recipes that never seem to work out in the summer. My looses come out flat. Even my pita doesn’t seem to rise into a nice pocket. Using 100% red fife.
Also wondering- do you ever do your bulk ferment in the fridge ? I’m thinking of simply keeping the recipe the same and fermenting in the refrigerator.
Yes I think hydration needs to be adjusted a bit if your climate calls for it. If your winters are very dry and then your summers are extremely humid as they are here in Toronto, they you’ll need to lower the hydration somewhat in the summer compared to winter. I’ve never tried to do bulk fermentation in the fridge. I’ve sometimes lowered the amount of levain used though to slow down fermentation.
There is a Vollkorn Dinklebrot recipe for whole-grain spelt bread up on the Central Milling website that has all of the flour (and bird food) in the soaker, and no flour in the final dough – the final dough is just the soaker, water, salt and yeast. It is worth looking at just to see the shape of the loaves in the picture. No idea what the pan looks like, never seen any bread loaf with that shape before. Click on the pic to enlarge it.
Thanks for the info. I plugged the Anson Mills recipe into my bakers’ percentage spreadsheet and, lo and behold, the hydration came out to 55%. That was the final hydration that sort of worked for my second loaf of Red Fife bread. I did not reduce the yeast in my recipes, so my bulk ferment and proof were shorter than the Anson Mills recipe. That could have helped the flavor some over my loaf. I have since made another loaf of 100% WW using King Arthur WW flour. It was easier to work with (i.e., normal hydration and gluten development) and I liked the “wheaty” flavor of the KA flour better than the Red Fife.
Jeff,
I found I liked other wheats better than Red Fife too, which is I why I had to reach back to my earliest home milling experiences. I soon switched to Turkey Red, which I still use, and Rouge de Bordeaux (which is wonderfully fragrant). But maybe I should try Red Fife again someday, since how the flavors develop and balance each other can depend a lot on your process.
I may try some of those flours in the future. What is the workability and hydration capacity of these flours? Any information you can share will help me avoid the issues I had with the Red Fife.
Thanks!
