Crusty English Bloomer Bread.

This is new to me.

I went searching for a recipe for this bread and found a couple.

I went with two different recipes. One using a pate fermentee and my regular bread flour and one that was a Whole Wheat version.

The first batch was a 1000g of flour, and a 200g pate fermentee, at 63% hydration, 5 g of yeast and 15g of salt (I’ve reduced the salt in my breads by 50% for lower sodium). I adapted the recipe from Culinary Explosion who used a poolish in his dough. I already had the pate fermentee in the fridge for a couple of days so that is what I used. I will post links to the recipes in comments.

I cut off another 200g piece of dough for future doughs and it went into the fridge and what was left was divided half and made two very large loaves of bread.

The crust is a beautiful colour and “crusty”

and the crumb surprised me.

Sliced while not quite cold,it was nice and soft with holes and the shine I usually get on baguettes and doughs with very little yeast. I wasn’t expecting an open crumb.

Moe had two slices buttered and Matt ate the heel.

Loaf on left is the whole wheat loaf.

The second batch – Whole wheat was from a different source and it was 400g bread flour with 100g of Whole Wheat , I used 8g of salt, 5 g of yeast (although this recipe called for 7) and again at 63%.