HogieWan's blog

Thanks to a combination of techniques learned here (better kneading, shaping and slashing, esp.) and (maybe) a new baking stone, my oven spring keeps getting better and better. Last night I baked a simple 25% WW loaf. After proofing my shaped oval loaf for 4.5 hours, I put nice long slashes mostly-lengthwise acroos the loaf and the cuts immediately opened up, showing I'm getting good surface tension. Slipped it on the hot stone, and within 5 minutes, it exploded.

My wife was asking me to make a "soft" white bread, so I hacked together a potato bread.  I'm not really sure what the recipe was, but there was WAY too much potato.  The dough was super sticky, but I forged ahead.  Oven spring was fantastic, but the bread was so soft the bread fell back in on itself upon cooling (the slash mark was strecthed flat upon removal from the oven).

In an attempt to slow down fermentation and try the less-work-but-more-time approach, I made a simple sandwich loaf. I baked the bread after it fermented 3 full days (1 day preferment, 1.5 days full dough bulk rise, 1/2 day in the loaf pan) only working with it in the evenings after work except for quick folding in the morning and moving it to the loaf pan the last morning.