💾 Archived View for thrig.me › food › bread.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 03:10:10. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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A pretty standard loaf. This is actually a half recipe that might be harder to work with than the standard form on account of there being less dough.
If your town water supply smells like a swimming pool let the water air out for at least a day in advance in an open container. Put a coffee filter or something over the lid to keep bigger dust, bugs, and spiders out. This assumes the chlorine used is actually the kind that can be gotten rid of by this method.
Mix ingredients until a mass has formed. Let the dough sit covered for about 10 minutes, then pinch and fold for about a minute. Let dough sit covered until it spreads out, maybe 30 minutes, then pinch and fold again. Set the dough covered somewhere for about five hours. So you'll want to start early in the morning, or find a cool place for the dough to rise overnight.
Dust and scrape dough out onto a floured surface and drag it into a ball with the usual 90 degree rotation between drags. Place in a proofing basket with the bottom (dragged) side down and let rise covered for about an hour and maybe a half. This may require finding some place warmer than usual if the house is cool, or the other way around. Poke the dough to check whether it is done.
Preheat the oven with dutch oven in it to 475F. The Dutch oven should be as high as possible in the oven, to avoid bottom burning problems?
Place the dough bottom side up in the dutch oven. Cover and bake for 30 minutes. Remove cover and bake for 15 to 20 more minutes. Let the loaf sit for at least 30 minutes after baking. If the bread knife does not come out clean after cutting, the loaf needed more time to rest.
Starting about 7:30 in the morning the bread should be ready by 17:00, maybe a little earlier.
Keep the loaf covered as it may too easily dry out, in which case it might need to be rehydrated or probably used for bread crumbs or in soups. If it lasts that long.
That loaf was made with all-purpose flour instead of bread flour so was a bit wobbly. Also it may not have gotten enough work before being put into the proofing basket.
The salt should typically be 10 grams per 500 grams of flour, but 11.5 grams or possibly pushing 12 does probably make for a better loaf, unless that is too much salt for you.
If the humidity is low, such as during winter, the oven might be seeded with shallow tins containing water. This may increase the humidity and thus probably the heat transfer. On the downside, there may be a blast of steam when opening the oven door.
The whole wheat percentage can be pushed up, or down. With 100g of whole wheat to 400g of bread flour the dough may need a bit more working, and may go well with unsalted butter and green apple slices. Probably the green apple slices should be cooked to soften them just a little, then broiled on the butter on the bread to a suitable crisp. More complicated would be to make a savory applesauce and to cover the bread with that, a sort of a cold climate Bruschetta, maybe with mustard and caraway.
