texasbakerdad's blog

The wife has tasked me to come up with a sandwich bread recipe our family can bake at least once a weak to completely replace our regularly purchased box store sandwich bread.

Requirements

Another great baking day. The crust was crunchy, crisp, and super flavorful. Too many good bakes in a row, I am due for a disaster :-)

We were having a friend over and decided we wanted to make pizza. We are making pizza at least twice a month now, but usually we throw the pizza together at the last minute, which enables a tasty pizza but just not as good as one where the dough is started the day before.

Had an excellent bake yesterday. Excellent, because I pushed a lot of boundaries and broke some of my bread baking rules and was still rewarded with excellent bread! I love when that happens, because I get to learn a lot when that happens. As a baseline, I tried to keep the recipe similar to first attempt at Sourdough Focaccia.

http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/66162/first-attempt-sourdough-focaccia-79-hydration

Rules I Broke:

For years I have wanted to try making focaccia, but since I am a bit obsessive about researching new things before I try them, I kept putting it off. Finally, my wife forced my hand... she made focaccia, and halfway through her bake (After bulk ferment) wanted me to step in and finish off the bake. Well, that bake went terrible, the dough had already way over-proofed and the focaccia came out quite dense.

This bake was new territory for me for 3 reasons...

Round 3 of the same recipe with mostly hydration changes.

Recipe:

• 346g HEB brand bread flour
• 346g Home milled hard red wheat
• 585g water
• 48g sourdough starter (50% home milled hard red, 50% water)
• 1 heaping TBS of salt

Original Recipe: https://www.kingarthurflour.com/recipes/no-knead-sourdough-bread-recipe

My last bake went so well that I thought I would do it again and try to tweak 2 things about the bake. Here is the link to my blog entry for the last bake:
http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/64738/55-hydration-sourdough-4753-hard-red-wwheb-bread-flour

My 3 complaints about that bake:

Ingredients:

• 100g Sourdough Starter (50/50 Hard Red Wheat)
• 286g Whole Red Wheat (Home Milled)
• 376g HEB Bread Flour
• 18g Salt

This recipe was derived from the following King Arthur recipe:
https://www.kingarthurflour.com/recipes/no-knead-sourdough-bread-recipe

With the following modifications:

550 dF convection bake with Pizza Stone.

• 15% half whole wheat sourdough starter
• 5% whole wheat
• 80% all purpose flour
• 70% hydration

Bulk ferment for 2 hours in fridge and 2 hours at room temp. 

used parchment paper to make sliding pizza onto stone easy. 

franbaker and I are going to be baking the same recipes and comparing the results. My bake yesterday is the first of our cooperative bakes. We both attempted PiPs' "Home with Bread/Fighting Gravity" recipe. I am looking forward to see Fran's post about her bake day results.

franbaker's post about her bake:

100% WW Cooperative Baking with Texasbakerdad

Recipe (thank you PiPs!):