Tuesday, February 07, 2012

Tuesdays with Dorie: White loaf

Nothing quite smells like heaven as bread baking. This week's recipe in the Tuesdays with Dorie challenge is a loaf of white bread. Oddly enough, bread is one of my Twelve Things I Can Bake (c). But it has been a long time...

A confession to start: I've gone rogue on the technique. As written, the recipe used a stand mixer to do all of the work. I don't own one and have no place to store it even if I did. However, I checked Julia Child's The Way to Cook, also sitting on my bookshelf, and discovered she is a great fan of the food processor for bread making, for everything up until the final knead.

No picture, but the dough balled up nicely on top of the mixing blade, pulling together well after the initial break up when the butter was added. The final turns were done by hand on a floured board. (note to self: pull the plastic mixing blade from the processor out of the lump of dough before giving a first push)


The dough is turned into a greased bowl, turned to coat and covered with plastic wrap, then set aside to rise for an hour or so.


What to do while it rises? Have a cup of coffee and a piece of cake (not baked by me). Don't you envy my harvest gold countertop?


When it is doubled in size, punch it down (not pictured: the fingertip-poke smiley face I drew in the risen dough before punching it down)(I'm easily amused).

Stretch the dough out into a rough rectangle, then fold it in three like you're refolding a brochure for your next vacation to Disney. Pinch the edges shut, pat and push all around to get a nice, compact shape to drop into a greased loaf pan. Cover with greased (or sprayed with non-stick cooking spray) cling wrap and set aside to rise again.

Have another piece of cake. Or not.

Ooo! Look at the pretty loaf! Considering my yeast had an expiration date of October 2011, I'm impressed! (see the end of the post for other notes on oddities).


Into the oven it goes. Here is where things deviated from what I would usually do in baking bread.

First, at about ten minutes before the baking time was over, I turned the bread out of the pan and stuck an instant read thermometer in the bottom, with the business end hitting about the center of the loaf. According to Julia, the bread is done when it reaches an internal temperature of 200 degrees. It was only at 180, so back in the oven it went.

In another departure from the norm, I left the bread out of the pan, setting it directly on the oven rack for another eight minutes of baking. The exposed sides picked up some color, and the added stiffness of the side crusts made the entire loaf easier to slice.

Eight minutes later, assault the loaf again with the thermometer. Woo hoo! Exactly 200 degrees!


This was the most difficult part of the whole experience: waiting until it was just barely warm to slice into it.


The loaf sliced like a dream. In fact, it is possible to cut slices as thin as a quarter of an inch (but who wants such a skinny slice, unless you are making a sandwich?)


The crumb is a bit inconsistent, but I know exactly why: I'm lazy. I knew when I pulled the dough out of the food processor it was a bit wet, and I didn't knead enough flour into the dough, nor knead quite long enough on that final hand finish.

Because of an unplanned "hang with the girls" afternoon Saturday and an extra long (but phenomenal) church service Sunday, I never did get to the store. As a result, I used salted butter rather than unsalted in the dough, decreasing the amount of actual salt added just a tad. Since my food processor specifically says three and a half cups of flour is all it will handle, I made just one loaf instead of two (again, lazy). And I may have added a bit too much water...the yeast was pretty foamy, and it was hard to read the measure when I put in the rest of the water.

The entire process, start to finish, took about four hours, two and a half of which was rising/baking time. Practice would cut that down by almost an hour.

Truly, I follow directions much better than this most of the time...but I've made a lot of bread in the past, and knew what the tolerances for error were.

That does it for the first Tuesdays with Dorie.

Oh, wait - the taste? Incredible.

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