7/6/2010 - White Bread

I decided to start simply.  What could be easier than white bread?  I know my old mainstay recipe by heart, and as I glanced through PR's formula it looked very familiar.  His has a little less flour, but I've gravitated toward kneading in less of it myself in the past month or two.  I figured this would be old hat.  But even with very similar ingredients, the technique PR suggests produced something completely different.

There are three white bread variations in BBA.  The one I opted for features a pre-ferment.  A pre-ferment allows the yeast more time to work on the dough, developing flavor, and while this isn't as important for an enriched bread like this one (it derives much of its flavor from its enrichment: milk and egg yolk), I figured it couldn't hurt.  The pre-ferment did its thing, and after it had been sitting for about an hour I mixed in the rest of the ingredients.  This dough already felt completely different from my normal white bread dough - much softer, but not any stickier.  One thing I realized while making this bread is that I suspect I rarely knead my bread long enough.  Now having read an explanation of what is happening during the kneading process in the opening tutorial, I have a better understanding of what I'm trying to achieve.

I allowed the bread to rise, shaped and panned my loaves, and set them out to proof.  And then I forgot about them.  The dumb thing is that I wasn't even busy at that point in the day.  I put J5 (my 20-month son) and M (my 4-month old daughter) down for their naps and instead of preheating the oven I, like any good stay-at-home mom, plopped down in the computer chair to waste away the entire nap on the Internet.  I didn't remember the bread until M woke up an hour later and my loaves were quite over-risen.  I then proceeded to massacre them in an attempt to score them down the center before tossing the poor things into the oven.

While the finished products still bore the scars of my last-minute mutilation, I would call my first attempt a success.  This bread was much softer than any I've made before - lovely for sandwiches.  The crust had a stronger flavor than we are used to.  Not bad, just stronger.  I think I will try an egg wash next time and see what happens.