White leaven Bread

This is my experiments with the time consuming "White leaven Bread" from Dan Lepard's book "The handmade loaf". Since I did this on a weekday, I had "bulk ferment" the dough one day, shape and "retard" the loaves overnight in the fridge.

I baked one loaf straight out of the fridge, and let the other one come back to room temperature before baking.

The texture of the loaf that I let back to room temperature were just what I was looking for.

I did not have any strong flour at hand, so I added a tsp. of dried gluten powder.






The recipe

This is a basic white sourdough bread. The thing to notice however, is that only 20% of the flour is in the sponge. This makes the dough very slow. It needs 4 hours of bulk fermenting with fliping and stretching, and the same amount of proofing. The recipe also suggests keeping the temperature below 25c, that slows down the dough additionaly.

The dough is also wet and difficult to handle, so I suggest generous amounts of olive oil, and at least a 20 minute autolysis, leaving the salt out. My supermarket flour has vitamin C added, so I didn't bother to put in any extra.

200 g white fully activated sourdough sponge (100% hydration)
500 g strong flour
325 g water
1 tsp of fine sea salt.

Baker's percentages calculator updated

http://www.glennbech.com/bakerspercentage/index.html

It's now possible to "suggest" a recipe of a given hydration level. This feature makes sure that the flour in he leaven is about 33% of your total weight, and that the hydration level of your dough is what you want.

I also added the possibility to scale a recipe up and down using factors between 0 and n. (1.5 is an extra half, 2 is double, 0.5 is half etc.)

Play around with it .-)

Making proving baskets

Swearing to myself never to let dough stick to my cloth and ruin a loafI set out to make myself some wooden proving baskets.

A local "Panduro" hobby store had everything I needed. A wooden basket and 50 cm of linnen cloth. A few moments later, a couple of proving baskets were reality.

I floured these generously with rye flour, and tested them out on a barley bread from Dan Lepard's book "The handmade loaf". Progress report will follow :-)

Click the image for a full size version. On the top image you can see it on top of my very personal and hand crafted bread peel that I had a blast making a few weeks back.