Friday, November 10, 2006

No Knead Bread take Two, Loaf #3

I tend to binge on new recipes until I feel that I get them "perfect", thus I did 2 more loaves of the No Knead Bread. From this I learned a couple of things. One is that rye and spelt wheat flour as one third of the bread flour total makes for a good loaf with this recipe. Another is that bench proof time (the second rise after the dough is formed into the loaf shape) has it's limit. The loaf on the far left went into the oven after the first was done, so it sat out for 45 minutes longer than the first loaf (which proofed about 2 hours, maybe 2.5 at most). When I tossed it (the rye loaf, if you were curious) into the pot the dough was already spreading out, and kinda blobbed over onto its side. It came out less uniform and the air bubbles are much smaller. Tastes darned good, though. I figure one more experiment before I put this recipe onto the back burner for awhile. The only real difference in methodology was that instead of wrapping the dough in a floured towel like the recipe said, I put them on cornmeal covered parchment paper and put them into a plastic container that kept them warmer and prevented the dough from drying out.

The loaf on the far right was my first experiment with Oliver the Sourdough starter. It rose wonderfully, but I didn't put very much starter into the dough so it's a very mild sourdough flavor. I'm going to make a much larger amount of sourdough starter before tackling it again, and do a bit more research on the use of sourdough in loaves since baking with sourdough is new to me.

Although three loaves were completed, I only consider the spelt wheat bread to be the loaf to count for the 100 Loaves project, as the other two were experiments for future breads.

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