Big Bread - white

I bought white bread flour for the Thanksgiving party and it is time to use it up.

This is about a 2-pound sourdough loaf baked from Graincraft’s Morbread. It is a flour that I like for white bread.

I measured out 400 gr water, 600 grams of flour, and 12 gram of salt.

A couple of ounces of my starter was mixed with a similar volume of the water, and enough flour mixed in to make a very soft dough, which was left to sit (covered) on the counter for a few hours until it had more than doubled in volume and looked foamy.  

I added about 150 gr of water (leaving about 200 grams of water), and enough flour to make a very soft mix. The soft mix is easy to stir, so it can be easily stirred well. Then, it sat covered on the kitchen counter for a few hours.  Thus, most of the flour will be fully hydrated and have developed gluten, before the final dough mix.

I tossed in the salt, the rest of the water, and mixed. Then, I gradually mixed in the rest of the flour to form a dough about the consistency of baguette dough. This is an easy knead!  And, let it ferment for a couple of hours.  Later in the evening, I rounded it up, bench rest, shaped, and put it in a banneton and let it rise in the refrigerator overnight.

In the morning it finished rising on the counter, and after 1.5 hours, it went onto a bake stone an electric oven preheated to 400F. I put a piece of parchment paper on the peel and turned the proofed loaf onto the parchment paper. The parchment paper makes it easy to use a peel to lay the loaf in the baking stone. After 20 minutes the temp was dropped to 375F, the parchment paper retrieved,  and the loaf was baked to an internal temp of 208F. Total time from measuring the ingredients to finishing baking was ~ 18 hours, half on the counter in a cool room, half in the refrigerator, with 40 minutes in the oven. 

It has a nice crisp crust, a slightly chewy crumb that is barely dense enough not to leak sandwich fillings (when cut thick), and definite, but very mild, sourdough and bread flavors. It is well suited to a wide variety of menus. By any standard, it is an excellent bread.

Sorry guys, I like a golden-brown crust, (sometimes with the rustic flour coating that makes it look pale).  I like the ease of just using my peel to slip loaves in and out of the oven.  I like the ease of mixing flour into water. I think mixing water and flour into levain makes a better dough.

The really nice thing about the white flour is that its hydration is predictable, so one can use a precise baker’s percentage.