Soccer Day Bread

On Sunday I just couldn't stand having a day without bread baking. I had made my rather flat 2 day old starter bread on Saturday night and now there was nothing rising or baking in my kitchen. So I decided to see what kind of a bread I could create in one day. I worked with the same 4 ingredients I have been using; white flour, water, salt and yeast; oh and a piece of old dough.

I had saved a piece of the dough from my last batch of bread so I broke that in pieces and let soften in ½ cup warm water for 10 minutes. I then added 2/3 cup of all-purpose flour and 2/3 of a cup of bread flour. If you're wondering why I bother with the different flours, my thought was that the bread flour has higher gluten levels so I thought since I had a shorter time to let the gluten develop in my bread that maybe bread flour was the way to go, but I had already started with the all -purpose flour so I ended up with both. I had to use my hands to really incorporate everything.

I let it sit for 10 minutes to let the water be absorbed then I put it to mix with the dough hook in my Kitchen Aid. I went ahead and mixed the final dough now. As I'm retyping this it seems like maybe the whole first part was an extra step. I'm not really sure what it did! So I added 1 cup water, 3 cups bread flour, 1 tsp yeast and 2 tsp salt. I let this ride in the KA for 8 minutes on a med/low speed then covered the bowl with plastic wrap and placed in in a warm spot near our pellet stove, which on Sunday was on, yes it was that chilly!

Off I went in that cold weather to watch my little one play soccer. Three hours later I returned my risen dough to the KA which ran for 4 minutes. I then shaped the loaves and let them rise for 1 hour before putting them in a 500 degree oven that had been steamed. I reduced the temp to 400 after 5 minutes and baked an additional 12 minutes. Here is a photo of the result:

Not bad right? The dough was a much stiffer dough. I was able to shape it into loaves which in the hour I let them rise kept a great shape and gained some bulk. I had my first really sucessful scoring. I used a razor blade to slash the tops of my loaves and they split open just right. It was very satisfying. The crust had this amazing crackle. The inside was really soft and fluffy with lots of tiny little air bubbles, no big stretchy holes. I like big stetchy holes. This was very similar to a store bought Italian bread. I think it was a really good 'every day' kind of bread but it isn't special. So I'm trying to take what I learned from this dough and apply the good things like the hydration level of the final dough, the rise time of the final dough and the scoring technique and apply them to a longer fermenting bread which should have more complex flavor and lots of big stretchy holes!