Country White Bread ~ Day Two

They say watched pots never boil, well I say, watched doughs never rise! The dough should have taken 3 hours to proof (give or take an hour or two according to Silverton), instead it took seven hours to rise. I was using a wild yeast starter and knew that they can be highly unpredicatable but after seven hours I finally got annoyed and decided to bake the bread whether it was fully risen or not. I was expecting failure, so I was pleasantly surprised when what I actually got were two of the above, nicely browned and crusty on the outside with a nice hollow thud sound when thumped on the bottom.

The chapter, "A lesson in Bread Making" from Nancy Silverton's book "Breads from the La Brea Bakery" is an excellent and thorough reference for the beginning baker but it requires a LOT of reading to get to the parts of the recipe you need to complete the task. When you have a crying baby on your hands, the book can suddenly seem like a long-winded tome. There is a lot to learn from this chapter, things like Silverton's method of kneading which she says should be done one-handed and quite aggressivley, that her technique of letting the dough rest for 20 minutes after kneading is called an autolyse and a very common trick among bakers in France. I was surprised by Silverton's method of sprinkling and then kneading sea salt into the dough after it had rested for 20 minutes rather than adding the salt at the beginning when the dough was being mixed. I didn't know that the first pre-shaping of the dough for the proofing stage was called a mise en tourne and that it doesn't have to be beautiful. I learned that the cutting of the dough just before the baker puts it in the oven is called docking and is a necessary step for the dough to reach it's final height and shape, not to mention all the scientific detail about baking bread, her almost anal details on how temperature of the flour, dough, water, yeast, the room, etc can affect the final outcome of the bread. So you see, lot's of good stuff.

Things I learned from this baking experience:

1. Wild yeast cannot be tamed, it has a mind of it's own. If you think it's going to take 3 hours for your dough to proof when wild yeast is involved...have a good book handy because it ain't gonna co-operate.
2. I didn't need Silverton's recipe for White Starter to bake this bread because I already had my own starter, but I'd be curious to one day try hers because it uses grapes. I'm sure the taste between the two starters is world's apart and my bread probably tastes nothing like Silverton’s breads but I was still happy with it.
3. This is not a sour bread even though it uses a sourdough starter. My starter is over a year old and quite gamey smelling, and yet it produced a nice mellow loaf of bread. I don't know if using Silverton's starter would have resulted in a more sour bread but I doubt it.
4. An Exacto Knife works just as well as a razor or baker's lame for that slashing of the dough step:
   
   
5. You don't necessarily need baking stones although ultimately it would be ideal to have them for a good crusty bread, but if you're careful, follow instructions well, and pretend you have baking stones you can still get a good crackly crusty loaf:
   
   
   
6. Although not filled with big airy holes I was still happy with the crumb even if it did come out a little dense:
   
   
   

Overall, it was a good first time experience using Silverton's book and recipe. I wouldn’t say it was practical, it did take two days and these days with a newborn around that’s a lot of time I don’t have. It was still worth the effort, the bread was tasty, with the right amount of salt (I used Fleur de Sel), the texture was good and the crust was just right.

Written by Deb on March 5, 2004 05:10 AM