Regional Tasting Panel Discards Miche After Identifying 'Accidental' Large Air Pockets as Structural Irregularities

The Lower Third Regional Tasting Panel discarded a 1.8 kg miche on Saturday after ruling its largest air pockets structural irregularities rather than evidence of controlled fermentation.

The loaf was submitted by Bettina Aro, who bakes six miche a week out of a shared kitchen on Dunmore Row, at 82.4% hydration on a stone-milled white with 15% whole rye. Her log records a 4 hour 45 minute bulk and an 18-hour cold retard. She scored it with a single off-centre grigne that opened into a pronounced ear. The panel, seven members at a trestle table in the community hall, cut it into wedges and went quiet for what several of them would later describe as too long.

The finding, filed the same afternoon, separates the offending pockets into three categories: vertical tunnelling above the mid-crumb, a cluster of connected alveoli along the upper third, and one cavity the panel chair described as "large enough to hold a wine cork sideways." Harold Nix, who keeps the panel's dimensional records, logged the widest at 41 mm and the mean at 11.6 mm, which he noted is not in itself a violation of anything.

What it is a violation of depends on whom you ask, and Saturday's room contained both answers.

"The panel does not rule on taste, it rules on structure, and structure is common sense," said Dorian Iverson, who sits on the standards subcommittee. Iverson added that an open crumb is "always something, and something is not always the same thing."

Rulebook Margin: when a standards fixture invokes common sense, cite the rule. Annex C, §4 of the Regional Tasting Protocol requires each entry be assessed "against the target declared by the submitting baker at intake." Aro's intake card declared: open, irregular crumb intended. On the plain reading, the panel failed her loaf for doing exactly what she said it would do.

The division among the purists is old and, on Saturday, uncivil. One camp holds that a crumb this open at this hydration is the whole argument: proper gluten development, a bulk ended at the right moment, oven spring that tore the grigne open. The other holds that cavities of 41 mm are a record of weak dough tension at shaping, and that calling it mastery is what happens when a bakery mistakes a structural shortfall for a signature. Both camps ate the loaf. Neither conceded.

Aro later said the dough had passed the windowpane test. "If it proofed wrong, I'd like to know which hour," she said. "I've got all of them written down."

The loaf sat on the counter beside the urn until a runner took it home. Aro has booked a slot for next month. Her intake card, this time, declares a target of "closed, even crumb," which several bakers have already called the more daring of the two submissions.