Imsil bread

This bread I used to make with my befriended Korean baker Yoo. He has a beautiful small bakery in the town of Imsil and is one of the few who bakes sourdough bread in Korea. He solely uses Korean flour (and even partially from his own harvest!), which has quite a unique flavor and also has quite a different structure from what we have here in Europa. Therefore, I experimented with the recipe to create the following bread that resembles the one we baked together in Korea.

I find it easy to enjoy making this bread: it’s a pleasant dough to work with, the overnight final fermentation makes everything very relaxed for me and the resulting bread is of the kind I just keep eating. The overnight fermentation gives the bread a lot of flavor and beautiful crust and the addition of 20% whole grain wheat flour gives it bit of a bite too.

Recipe

Overall formula (for 12 breads of ~ 350gr)

Hydration: 70%
Pre-fermented flour: 17,5%
Total time: 24 – 28hrs

Ingredient	Weight	Percentage
Wheat flour	1960 gr	78,4%
Whole grain wheat flour	500 gr	20%
Whole grain rye flour (from mature SD culture)	40gr	1,6%
Water	1751ml	70%
Salt	40 gr	1,6%
Total	4291 gr	171,6%

Pre-ferment

Make the following pre-ferment with 100 hydration and let it ferment for 8 hours at ~ 24°C/76F) or overnight at room temperature (~ 20°C/68F). Make sure to cover it so it doesn’t lose any water by evaporation.

Ingredient	Weight	Percentage
Wheat flour	438 gr	100%
Water	438 gr	100%
Mature sourdough culture (rye basis, 100%)	44gr	10%
Total	920 gr	210%

The pre-ferment should look like the one on the following picture. If there are few bubbles you can let it little longer. If it fermented too long or too warm you’ll see that it has collapsed (markings on the walls of the bowl that the dough had risen and subsequently collapsed)

The pre-ferment should be full of bubbles

If you are happy with your pre-ferment you can make the final dough. Aim for a temperature of the final dough of ~ 24°C. Mix the following ingredients and knead by hand for about 10mins.

Ingredient	Weight
Wheat flour	1563 gr
While grain wheat flour	500gr
Water	1313ml
Salt	40gr
Pre-ferment	875gr
Total	4291gr

The next step is the bulk fermentation. For this bread it takes about 2½ hours and benefits from 2 stretch and folds (at 50 min intervals).
After the bulk fermentation divide in the dough in 12 pieces of ~ 350gr and pre-shape them for a round loaf.
After a 10 min bench rest, shape them as a round loaf and give them a tiny bit of a rectangular shape. The latter you can accomplish by instead of pulling and rotating 90°, rotating 180°. But only in the very last seconds of the shaping.
Place the shaped dough in bakers linen and transfer to fridge for final fermentation. My fridge is about 5,5°C and 12hrs is fine. If yours is warmer, a shorter fermentation might be better, and vice versa, if yours is cooler you can leave it longer.
Transfer to baking sheets and score them with a single stroke.
Bake at 220°C/432F for about 25 mins with steam. Let the steam escape after 18 mins.