Bread

I have recently started making my own bread again (my old loaves were never that great, so I stopped work on them). The reason for starting again is my experiments with pizza dough. I noticed all the big bubbles that formed in the dough while it was rising in the fridge (The higher mositure doughs I made in the past). I was always anoyed when I made the pizza crusts, all those bubbles were destroyed and I never got to taste them. How wonderful it would be in a bread loaf! But alas, taking it out and shaping it into a loaf would damage the bubbles and they would never fully recover, even after allowing to rise again.

Enter my stroke...of genius! Make the dough, place it in a loaf pan, cover with plastic wrap and let it rise in the fridge before baking. BRILLIANCE!

I was concerned at first about putting cold dough directly into a preheated oven, so the first experiment (which I am keeping lock stepped to my pizza dough tests), with a ratio of 0.667 was allowed to sit out at room temperature for about an hour before baking. I preheated the oven to 400ºF and cooked for 10 minutes before reducing the temperature to 350ºF for a another half hour. No washes or steam was added before, during or after cooking.

When it came out it looked a little dark, which made me fearful of how the loaf would taste. Luckily when I ate the first slice I was relieved, it tasted great! It was also a tough bread, something I definetly enjoy. However it did tend to stick to the loaf pan.

The second loaf (again lock stepped) was 0.650 and to avoid the sticking issue, I placed the doughin a silicone loaf pan that I have to rise. This one I took straight from the fridge into the oven, without any noticeable difference in the final product. When it was cooking, I could faintly smell silicone, so I am wary of trying the pan again. However when I unmolded it, it had an awesome texture and did not stick at all. After some trepidation as to whether I should try some or not (after all I did smell silicone while baking), I tried it. I was expecting a silicone taste, which was lacking. I can happily say that I have nearly eaten the whole loaf, and it was delicious all the way through.

There was a problem with both loaves though, the water ratio wasn't high enough to create the really big bubbles that I want, so the loaves were slightly denser than I want. This problem should go away as I increase the ratio. While this ratio seems to be working well for pizza dough (so far), it isn't quite cutting it for bread.

The current loaf is at 0.700 (again lock stepped) and is currently rising in the metal loaf pan I started with. This time I lightly greased it with some olive oil.