Baking Sourdough with Golden Yacht Flour

With everything going on, I imagine a lot of people are spending more time at home. The bread flour I normally use for sourdough is out of stock on Amazon. So I am taking the opportunity to bake with a flour I have never used before. What I could get hold of was Golden Yacht.

Ingredients:

• Starter60g
• Bread flour (Golden Yacht)250g
• Water (around 20°C)165cc
• Salt4g

Conditions:

• Date19 April 2020
• Room temperature20℃
• Humidity57%

According to what I found online:

Golden Yacht is classified, alongside Super King, as an extra-strong flour. It blends high-protein Canadian and American wheat and bakes into loaves with real volume. Recommended for adding lift to breads packed with fillings such as raisins or nuts, and for blending with lower-protein Japanese flours, whole wheat or rye.

Golden Yacht contains added malt flour, guar gum and vitamin C to improve flavour and volume. Their roles are as follows.

• Malt flour: improves the extensibility of the dough and enhances flavour.
• Thickener (guar gum): improves water retention, keeping the bread soft for longer.
• Vitamin C: strengthens gluten and increases volume. It also tightens the dough, keeping it from going slack.

So it said.

Using it in practice, the first impression while shaping was that it stuck to my hands more than usual. The hydration was the same as always, but the dough felt softer. And the rise during fermentation seemed 10–20% greater than usual.

Baked, it came out an odd gourd shape, unlike anything before. The score did not open cleanly either. I think the dough stretched so readily overall that no tear formed where I had cut it.

Eating it, the impression was of something very light. Soft on the palate too. Personally I prefer something with more grit and crackle to it, but I suspect that with different shaping and a different approach to scoring, this flour could be made to work.

More study required.