Inb4 angry italians, come on southern neighbors go at it XD

Gwent

I used to have a boss that said that there are two types of IT admins, those that used hardware raid once and will never again, and those that haven’t lost any data to it yet.

Ground news is a service, if you like it, pay for it.

That kind of stuff is not where FOSS excels

No, I think the first one did the fermenting, the second one helped with gluten.

You don’t need to worry with yeast distribution, you do the poolish as you are already doing, only change is that before you mix the poolish with the rest of the ingredients, you leave water and flour to know each other for a 30-60 minutes, mix it just a bit no need to knead at all.

Then you mix the autolyzed dough with the poolish and salt and knead for 5-10 minutes, it will be mixed very well after all that kneading, no worries.

Then you fold and let rise as your current process, I don’t do fridge steps, unless I need to wait with baking for some reason.

Edit: yeast with the main mass is useless imo, the yeast should all come from the poolish, that is why we do it: to give the yeast a head start and have more flavour as a bonus

The process you describe has a very short autolysis step (the 5 minutes to absorb water), I suggest you try your usual process again, but give it 30 minutes there. The autolysis helps in developing gluten strenght and is even more beneficial than folding.

IMO the reason why it worked better with the double poolish is because the second poolish had time to autolize and developed a very good gluten polymerization and you profited from that as you kneaded it 4h later

I think too that this is it, those malts op listed, while carrying a lot of flavour, do not have many enzymes, op might not have converted enough starch