I made my usual
sourdough rye beer bread using this flour today. As suggested on the
Vetta website, I upped the hydration a little by adding 5% extra beer to both the soaker and the main dough.
The dough definitely is high in gluten. After kneading, I did the usual three rounds of one-hour rise followed by slap and fold. The dough is noticeably stickier and stretchier than the one I make with Caputo Manitoba Oro flour (14 % protein). I had the dough in the fridge overnight and then gave it another three hours at room temperature before baking. The rise turned out much the same as with my normal dough, taking about the same amount of time and producing the same bulk.
The final shaping was quite a challenge because the dough had a lot of spring-back. Every time I tried to stretch it out into a sheet so I could fold and roll it, the dough "fought back" and kept snapping back to nearly its original shape. It was also stickier than what I am used to. Overall, it behaved a little like chewing gum during shaping. In the end, I had to modify my usual shaping technique because there simply was no way that I could stretch out the dough into a sheet thin enough to fold and roll the way I usually do.
I used the same temperature as usual for baking. I didn't get quite as much oven spring this time, but I would not necessarily blame the flour for this. How much oven spring I get is still fairly variable for me, and I have yet to figure out why it is sometimes less than other times.
Here is the result:
The loaf darkened a little quicker than usual. This might be due to the change in hydration or the flour (or both), I'm not entirely sure. At any rate, I pulled the loaf a little earlier, after 45 minutes of total baking time. Core temperature was 96 ºC (205 ºF) at that point.
The crumb turned out fine, nice and even:
The aroma and taste are (not surprisingly) the same as usual. The texture is good, nice and substantial without being too chewy. There is a difference to my usual flour though: overall, this bread feels a little more dense and substantial in texture. Not that I would call it rubbery (far from it), but I can definitely tell that it has more gluten than usual. There is just that bit more springiness and "heaviness" in the crumb.
In terms of nutrition, the caloric value of this flour (339 kcal) is about the same as that of Manitoba Oro (350 kcal), but it contains 1.5 times as much protein and 3 times as much fiber, and only 0.76 times as much carbohydrates, so one could argue that this is a healthier flour. Some people might want to use it for that reason alone.
Overall, I'll call this experiment a success. This flour definitely works for bread baking. I'm not sure that I would switch to this flour for my breads on a regular basis though. Not that it is worse than my usual flour (nor is it better). It's simply different, but not so much that I would chase this particular texture on a regular basis.
Where I can really see it working is for
New York style bagels, where the dense and chewy texture is desirable. I'll probably do a batch of these soon, omitting the Vital wheat gluten that is in the recipe but using the Vetta flour instead of Manitoba Oro.
