The first project in the King Arthur baking book is a basic loaf of bread. Bread is one of the items I’ve baked the most, and I considered skipping this bake, but I am a completionist, and I have yet to find a really good homemade sandwich bread, so I went ahead with the project.
I started with the mise en place:
I combined the dry ingredients…
Then stirred in the butter…
And added the water.
Next, I kneaded the dough by hand for 5 minutes. At the beginning of kneading the butter was still in chunks, but I worked them in as I came across them in the dough. I thought the kneading was done around 2 minutes in, which may be because I’m more used to making minimally kneaded artisanal-style breads. I kept kneading for the full 5 minutes, adding flour as needed, and I was surprised by how much bounce the dough gained as I worked it.
After kneading I put the dough back in the mixing bowl, took its temperature, covered it, and set it aside to rest for an hour. I took this opportunity to clean up my workspace.
After an hour I used the “doorbell test” to confirm the dough was ready to be shaped. It can be hard to measure when a dough has doubled from visual cues alone, so additional methods to gauge the dough’s readiness are helpful. In the picture below you can see that when I poked the dough it sprang back partially, but not all the way.
I used my dough scraper to scrape the dough out of the bowl onto a floured counter.
I divided the dough into two, then weighed it to make sure both halves had equal amounts of dough (610g). Then I shaped each loaf. With the first loaf I tried to follow the shaping instructions in the book, but I didn’t understand them well and I thought the loaf could have been shaped better (I figured out later that there is a video showing how to shape a sandwich loaf in the King Arthur Baking library). For the second loaf I used my preferred shaping method: stretch the dough out from the edge in 4 directions to make a rough rectangle. Fold the sides in, then fold the bottom up and press to add tension. Continue folding the bottom up and pressing until the dough is all rolled up. Roll the dough a little more against the counter to seal the seam, and tuck both side edges under.
I placed both shaped loaves into greased pans (I greased the pans before dividing the dough), covered the pans, and left them to rise.
The recipe says the final rise can take 45-90 minutes, which is quite a range of times! My kitchen is rather warm (74 degrees F), so I expected the final rise to be on the shorter end of that spectrum and began preheating my oven immediately after shaping the loaves. I decided to do an experiment in the oven: one loaf would bake regularly in the open oven, and the other would bake inside my clay bread baker. I wanted to see if trapping the steam from the dough would impact the oven spring and how big the impact would be. I do also have a baking stone on the lower rack of my oven for increased thermal mass.
45 minutes later the oven was preheated and my loaves passed the doorbell test, so I loaded the bread into the oven.
After 15 minutes I removed the cover from the clay baker to allow the second loaf to brown.
15 minutes later I checked on the bread. The covered loaf had good colour, but the loaf in the baker didn’t have as much colour as I would have liked, so I left both loaves in the oven for an extra 5 minutes. A lot of steam came out of the oven when I opened it this last time.
After a 35 minute bake I took the bread out of the oven. The loaf in the clay baker (on the right in all these photos) baked very slightly higher than its sibling, and was a bit paler on both top and bottom.
The hardest part about baking bread is waiting for it to cool before cutting into it. After an hour and a quarter I could no longer wait. I ate my first piece with butter and finishing salt: it was sublime!
This bread has good flavor and texture. It is tender, but not too tender for sandwiches (this is a problem I have seen with most sandwich loaves I’ve tried). It makes great toast! I recommend this bread.
A Baker's Education 