I have a small quantity of whole einkorn that I need to use up before it goes bad. I decided I’d incorporate it into a milk bread with most of it being used in the tangzhong. I decided to do it this way because einkorn doesn’t have the best gluten so won’t add much to the structure of the dough. The rest of the einkorn goes into the stiff sweet levain along with all of the whole wheat. The rest of the flour is bread flour comprising 73% of the total flour.
To review, the idea of using a stiff sweet levain is that with sufficiently high sugar concentration, it will have a dehydrating effect on the microbes. This effect is greater on the LAB compared with the yeast. As a result, this levain is relatively deficient in LAB compared with a similar levain at the same hydration without the sugar. A bread leavened with this style of levain will generally have less sour tang unless it over ferments. I find that a Hokkaido milk bread is generally better without too much sour tang.
Unfortunately, this dough got away from me and over-fermented somewhat. We can see this with the loss of definition between the four lobes. Typically a well fermented bread with four lobes will have the appearance of four distinct “hills”. If one under-ferments this bread there will be a lot of tearing between the hills and they might be quite exaggerated. When over-fermented as this one was, you see a loss of definition of the hills.
Fortunately, this still baked up well and was extremely soft and fluffy.
