Nothing Bread - 100% Unbleached Yeast Water White Bread

I know you are thinking the same thing I am when Lucy came up with this one.  What is wrong with her?  No whole grains, no sourdough, no add ins – No Nothing Bread!

I was quickly reminded that we had company coming over for Valentines Day with one not even out of high school and they might nit like those other kinds of wonderful breads we like so much.

Plus it has been a long time since we baked with our yeast water, now apple and about forever since we baked with it alone without at least some SD in there somewhere!  Lucy thought about using some bread flour or some light colored beer or whey or even enriching this dough with cream cheese, egg and butter but thought I was way too lazy to follow through with it. 

She might be right but this bread was just Sprouts binned unbleached white AP flour at 12% protein, water, YW and salt.  She really made it easy using one of her favorite fool proof, except for me of course, 1_2 3  concoctions so no formula required for this post.

We starter with 60 g of YW and flour each making a 120 g , 1 stage levain that we retarded for 48 hours after it doubled in volume - which took 12 hours as the YW had been stored for months with no maintenance.

We did autolyse the dough flour and water for 1 hour as the YW levain warmed up on the counter with the salt sprinkled on top.  Once the levain hit the mix, we did 3 sets of slap and folds of 7, 1 and 1 minute each and 3 sets of stretch and folds from the compass points all on 20 minute intervals. 

We then pre-shaped and shapes the dough into a squat oval, put it in a rice floured basket, bagged it and retarded it for 13 hours.  The dough didn’t proof enough during the retard so we let it warm up on the counter for 3 hours before firing up BOB to 500 F with Mega Steam in place.

We un-molded the dough and slashed it in a decorative way, at least for us, hoping the long middle slash would get an ear and that this bread would blister and brown well.  We slid the dough on the bottom stone and turned the oven down to 450 F for a 15 minute steam bath.

Once the steam came out, we turned the oven down to 425 F, convection this time, and baked it for another 10 minutes until the internal temperature was 208 F.  We then turned off the oven and let it sit on the stone until the internal temperature hit 210 F when the bread was removed to the cooling rack.

While waiting for that YW levain to double a prickly pear margarita hits the spot..

Sure enough it sprang and bloomed well with an ear in the middle, large blisters pretty much everywhere and a nicely browned cover too.   Lucy loves it when everything on the outside comes out as planned but ….. we will have to wait on the inside until it cools down  and we can slice it for lunch turkey pastrami sandwich.  Right now it looks like it has some promise.