Overnight White Bread! Recipe number 3 from Flour Water Salt Yeast. I didn’t make it on Sunday because I got messed up with the holiday weekend and my schedule kind of fell apart. But, I did make this bread yesterday. The main difference between the first two recipes is the amount of water and yeast and the fermentation time. More water, less yeast and 12 to 14 hours of fermenting at room temperature. Hence the overnight part of the recipe. Ken does have work arounds for the scheduling but I was just plain lazy to be honest.
Everything for mixing this bread is the same as the other breads but I have to say that with more water that dough was STICKY! Easier to mix up but kind of a bear to work with. Anyway, I did the 3 folds in the first hour and a half and managed to get the last fold in before 10:00 pm. So the fermentation time started at 8:45 pm. Great, I figured I had between 8:45 and 10:45 am to get the dough divided, proofed and baked. I got up around 7:00 am and first thing I did was look at the giant bucket and holy moly, I was not expecting to see what I saw.
It had more than tripled and was gassy and bubbly and very loose. After I got showered and dressed, I divided the dough. Did I mention that it was very STICKY!? Once I got the dough on my board, it spread out like crazy but I pressed on and divided the dough and managed to work it into a ball and placed it in the brotform.
It spread out immediately! Once both loaves were in the baskets, I covered them with a tea towel and let them proof for about an hour. Oven was preheating to 475℉ with the Dutch ovens inside. The bake time was the same, 30 minutes with lid on and about 20 minutes with lid off. I think I should have gone maybe another 5 minutes because I thought the crust should have been a bit darker.
For some crazy reason, I cannot divide the dough into equal portions. One loaf was smaller than the other. This has happened every time. Hmm! I let the bread cool and cut into the loaf. Nice holes, nice crumb but I really think it needed that extra 5 minutes in the oven. The inside was moist. It tasted really good though, definitely more flavor than the first white bread I did.
Even though it tasted good, I don’t know if I would make this particular loaf again. I just didn’t like how loose the dough was. Next week is an Overnight 40% Wheat Bread. Same principle but with wheat flour added to the AP flour. I just bought a grain mill and I’m going to try milling my own wheat flour so this should be quite the experiment. Maybe I’ll even get it done on Sunday!