Open Crumb Obsession Leads to 'Alveolar Void' Identity Crisis for Local Miche

A Lower Third baker has been unable to distinguish his own miche from a cellulose dish sponge in three consecutive blind tastings, according to a protocol he wrote and administered himself.

Ellis Osgood of Ferrow & Sons has spent fourteen months building a more open crumb. Over that stretch he moved his final dough to 88.0% hydration, swapped his strong white for a 11.4% protein all-purpose "for tenderness," and cut his coil folds from four to one, on the grounds that handling was knocking the alveoli down. Bulk ran four hours and twenty minutes at a dough temperature of 26.4°C, then eighteen hours cold, then 42 minutes at 24°C. The loaves came out at 97.2°C (207.0°F). The grigne opened cleanly. The ear folded over in the last four minutes of oven spring, which Osgood logged as cosmetic.

The holes, by his own ruler, were excellent. That was the problem.

"I did the square-cut test, five centimetres, backlit, and I thought, that is a very handsome miche," Osgood said. "Then I dried the sponge on the rack next to it and I could not tell you which one I had scored."

He built a protocol. Two numbered samples per round, cut at the same depth, a neighbour who did not bake turning the cups. Three rounds. Three calls of "sponge." The mechanism is not mysterious: at 88.0% hydration with weakened flour and a single fold, the dough never built a gluten network strong enough to hold its own gas. The bubble walls tore during bulk, adjacent cells merged, and the miche came out of the oven with voids the size, shape and greyish translucency of a synthetic sponge's pores. Underfermented bulk was ruled out by volume; this was a gluten-development shortfall, and the loaf was honest about it the whole time.

Harold Nix, who keeps a quarterly count of holes per 25 cm² across nine neighbourhood bakes, logged Osgood's miche at 61 voids and the sponge at 58.

"Within the margin, which is the part Ellis doesn't want to hear," Nix said.

The standards board weighed in through Dorian Iverson, whose ruling circulated the same afternoon: "Alveolar voids shall be assessed for irregularity and wall translucency. Resemblance to any household implement is a failure of the sample, not of the method." Iverson added, unprompted, that the ear had been correctly classified as cosmetic.

Osgood has gone back to 14.6% protein flour at 78.0% hydration with four folds. The sponge has been returned to the sink. He has ordered a second one, for calibration.