(2013-08-04)
My wife and I decided to start taking sandwiches to work, so I thought it was a good idea to try a light loaf of bread– similar to a store bought loaf but home made.
The recipe was the Light Wheat Bread formula from Peter Reinhart’s The Bread Baker’s Apprentice. It involves milk powder and instant yeast, two ingredients I hadn’t used in a long time.
It was good to switch to making an entirely different type of bread. With a lower hydration bread, the dough is a lot easier to knead and shape, so you can get good practice on those techniques.
In the end the formula makes a loaf that was a bit too large for the pan. I think I should have bought a different sized pan, but I was not going to go out and buy another one, so I would just need to adjust the portions to get a smaller amount of dough for the next bake.
The bread was a pretty good success! There were only two things that I would take away as lessons learned for the next bake:
Lesson #1: Smaller loaf for a lighter crumb
Because the dough was too much for the loaf pan, I had to stop the proofing stage prematurely, to avoid the dough completely spilling over the sides of the loaf pan. This meant that the dough could not rise to its full potential. The result was that the dough was light, but could have been even lighter had it been alllowed to proof for the specified time. Next time, I’ll be sure to scale the forrmula down to have less dough.
Lesson #2: Avoid the spiral
A loaf of bread is dough rolled into a tube shape and baked in a loaf pan. The loaf I made came out good, except that you could clearly see a spiral in the center of the loaf. This was obviously due to the way the loaf was rolled. I’m not sure how to fix that for the next loaf, but for sure I’ll strive to have a more uniform-looking crumb.
New Equipment Purchase: Loaf Pan
I had to pick up a loaf pan for this bread. I decided on a teflon loaf pan, thinking the teflon would make it easier. It ended up working well, but the formula was for a slightly larger loaf than the pan allows for.
:: Equipment on hand:
:: – Scaling: Digital scale – Terraillon Carre Inox
:: – Mixing: by hand
:: – Bulk Fermentation container: Stainless Steel kitchen bowl
:: – Dough Scraper/Cutter: Plastic scraper
:: – Proofing: Teflon loaf pan (new purchase!)
:: – Baking: Unglazed baking stone