Pane integrale

Last week I baked focaccia (using roughly the recipe in Sourdough focaccia 2), so this week I’ll try a different Italian bread: pane integrale, based on the recipe Marcella Hazan’s More Classic Italian Cooking.  Despite the name, only about ⅓ of the flour is whole-wheat flour. I’m adapting the recipe to work with my sourdough starter.

Day 1: I started with a light sponge to rise and sour overnight. Mix

1 cup sourdough starter
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup water
1 Tablespoon sugar

together in large bowl.  Cover and let rise overnight.

Day 2: Stir down and remove one cup of mixture for new sourdough starter. To the remaining sponge, add

½ cup whole wheat flour

and let rise for another day.

Day 3 (the day of baking): Mix into the sponge

1 Tablespoon olive oil
½ cup all-purpose flour
½ cup whole-wheat flour
2 teaspoons salt

with bread hook. Knead in an additional

¼ cup bread flour

by hand, to get a smooth dough. Place the ball of dough in a bowl with a little oil (turning to coat the ball with oil), cover, and let rise 3–4 hours until doubled.  The dough seemed a little dry to me—there may have been enough evaporation from the long rising of the sponge that I should have increased the water.

Knead the bread again “for a few seconds”.  Divide the dough into two parts and shape into ovals. Our family refers to this bread as football bread, because the shape is like an American football, but Marcella Hazan calls them “cigar-shaped rolls”. Perhaps because of the dough being a little too dry, I could not get the shaped loaves to cohere—I may need to add a ¼ cup more water next time I try this recipe.

Preheat oven to 450°F (which means setting 500°F on my oven).  While the oven is warming up, let the dough rest on baking parchment.  Just before baking, make a single, 1″ deep lengthwise slash of each loaf.  Brush the loaves with water (oops, I forgot to brush them) and slide onto the baking tiles in the oven.

Bake at 450°F for 12 minutes, then turn down the oven to 350°F (about 400° setting on my oven) and bake for another 35 minutes.  Cool for a couple hours on a rack before serving.

The loaves “exploded” in the oven—the lack of cohesion in the shaping becoming rather obvious.