November Endings with Bread, a New Approach

I put off the two bedroom painting projects to nurse myself back to health. I have had a sinus cold/infection for two weeks now and just when I think it is easing off I have another night of coughing and sleeplessness. Sometimes that leads to a hot lemon and honey drink to steam the discomfort away with a book or more knitting. More often than not, it's a book I choose just in case my groggy mind leads me to a knit mistake I would have to frog back.

The book I read was 'Slade House' by David Mitchell. This is the first book I have read in a long while that really had a well written writing style. Thank you David! Sort of a ghost story, but more complex than that.

I am also researching one of my other hobbies of bread baking. This time with Peter Reinhart's book - Crust and Crumb. I used to make the best tasting bread. It looked beautiful, but it really had a wonderful flavour. I haven't been able to capture it in the last few years and I blamed the modern grains we have to work with. Modern grains may very well be part of the problem, but perhaps my methods have slipped too? So I read Chapters one and two word for word and only occasionally looked ahead.

Well I started yesterday's bread making off differently. I started with a 'biga style' preferment. I mixed up a few pounds and let it age and do its flavour development at room temperature for 6 hours. I took off a pound, broke it up into small pieces in my large mixing bowl and added my fresh ingredients for two loaves worth. I put it through two risings and one final proof before the bake.

I monitored the internal temperature of the dough and the final bread; something I haven't done before. Final temperature of the loaf just out of the oven was 207 F degrees. Actually it should have been 185F according to the book, but it looked good.

The aroma of the bread coming from the oven at the 20 minute mark, I thought, was different and more pleasant than any of my previous breads. It was baking at 350F for 42 minutes. The loaves were for sandwich bread, so not a fancy artisan loaf. When they were removed from the oven, I tipped them out to check the colour which was good and set them on racks to cool.

By now, it is 10pm and the house smelled really good! I was supposed to wait 2 hours, but my husband had to have some right away, so we tried it immediately. I am fortunate to have some 'farm butter' in the house at the moment, so we cut into the loaf, sniffed it, examined the crumb and did the taste test with the 'farm butter'.

It was delicious! And the flavour of the other loaves (I can only describe it as yeast and alcohol) I had been making the last few years was not present in this one. This one was sweet tasting and had a wonderful texture and flavour. A definite success. I'm a believer in the science and chemistry in bread baking.

I can't do this post without a bread picture. A little lopsided, but unique.

Multigrain Sandwich loaf