Challenge Recipe #4 : White Leaven Bread
I am completely enamored with Dan Lepard's book The Handmade Loaf. (I am a little disappointed that it didn't seem to be stocked at any of the large bookstore chains in my area - thank goodness for the magical powers of the internet!) Dan is British ex fashion photographer turned semi-professional passionate home bread baker. All the gorgeous photographs in the book are of actual loaves he baked from the recipes in the book, taken by him, and are mostly unadorned loaves or slices. Almost every recipe is accompanied by one of his minimalist, straightforward pictures, and interspersed among the recipes are showcases of home bakers he met in his travels across Europe. I've been drooling over this book and working up the courage to bake out of it for a couple months now.
White Leaven Bread is the first recipe in his book, right after the formula for making a (sourdough) starter from scratch. Although that is something I will likely do at some point, I already have a functioning starter that lives in a crock in my fridge, so for this first recipe, it was a simple matter to feed it over a couple of days to the correct hydration for this recipe.
I learned some interesting things just from the feeding of my old faithful starter. I've been maintaining it for about six months, and I have always fed it with equal parts flour and water by measure, since I didn't own a kitchen scale until a few weeks ago. My measuring cups are cheap and plastic, and I've always done the scoop and level thing to measure flour. 100% hydration measured that way always yielded a thin, batter consistency starter, that started bubbling in under an hour even at cold room temperature. For this recipe, I started feeding it at 100% hydration by weight, the consistency done that way was a lot more like a very wet dough. After the first feeding, I was positive I had killed my starter, because after an hour it looked very much inert. I left it out overnight, and by the morning, it had puffed up and quadrupled in volume. I would never have guessed that 2 different methods of measuring would produce such dramatically different results.
Dan's recipe calls for a starter at 80% hydration. I simply refreshed my starter a couple of times over a couple of days at 100%, and inoculated a mix of 80:100 water:flour with a tablespoon of active starter to get the correct amount to bake with, and left it overnight. Since this is the first recipe in the book, he very helpfully lays out a timetable of steps to follow, starting with the initial mixing at 8:00 am, and ending with a bake at 5:30 pm.
Ok, now I have a really shameful confession to make. Prior to making this loaf, I had never actually had the courage to make bread entirely by hand. I have always relied on my trusty KitchenAid stand mixer to bring my dough to the windowpane stage. I don't feel bad confessing this now, because making this loaf entirely by hand may have done the trick and set me free from reliance on the machine. This recipe is made by very short intermittent kneading by hand on a lightly oiled surface (to avoid the temptation to overflour the board and lose the benefits of the very wet dough), interspersed with progressively longer rests/rises in a bowl, ending with a about a four hour rise in linen-lined baskets. Each time, the dough is kneaded for 10-15 seconds (which is about 12 strokes), then shaped into a ball before going back in the bowl. Starting out, I was positive the dough was too sticky, that it was never going to come together right. But after reading Dan's book cover to cover, and scouring his website, I had decided to just trust his recipe. This trust was rewarded. As the day progressed, the dough firmed up beautifully. His timing was perfect in a warm kitchen (I was roasting garlic, then later roasting a chicken as I was tending to the dough). By the time the dough was ready to go into the oven, it was fully risen and so strong it barely deflated at all when I scored the top.
These are, hands down, the best loaves I have ever baked. When I pulled the first loaf out of the oven and set it on a wire rack to cool, it immediately started crackling, with a sound like quietly crumpling paper. In all my bread baking to date, my loaves have never made such a distinctive sound as they started to cool. I knew immediately that I had done something right. I peeled the other loaf into the oven, and hovered over the first loaf as it cooled, listening and smelling. Somehow, this loaf, made from only flour, water, leaven, and salt, managed to smell intensely of roasted peanut butter.
This bred is sublime. The crust is thin and cracklingly crusty, the crumb is light and airy without being overly marked with giant holes, and the flavor is amazing. I'm a couple of days removed from making it now, and I still can't believe that I made bread this good entirely by hand.
White Leaven Bread is the first recipe in his book, right after the formula for making a (sourdough) starter from scratch. Although that is something I will likely do at some point, I already have a functioning starter that lives in a crock in my fridge, so for this first recipe, it was a simple matter to feed it over a couple of days to the correct hydration for this recipe.
I learned some interesting things just from the feeding of my old faithful starter. I've been maintaining it for about six months, and I have always fed it with equal parts flour and water by measure, since I didn't own a kitchen scale until a few weeks ago. My measuring cups are cheap and plastic, and I've always done the scoop and level thing to measure flour. 100% hydration measured that way always yielded a thin, batter consistency starter, that started bubbling in under an hour even at cold room temperature. For this recipe, I started feeding it at 100% hydration by weight, the consistency done that way was a lot more like a very wet dough. After the first feeding, I was positive I had killed my starter, because after an hour it looked very much inert. I left it out overnight, and by the morning, it had puffed up and quadrupled in volume. I would never have guessed that 2 different methods of measuring would produce such dramatically different results.
Dan's recipe calls for a starter at 80% hydration. I simply refreshed my starter a couple of times over a couple of days at 100%, and inoculated a mix of 80:100 water:flour with a tablespoon of active starter to get the correct amount to bake with, and left it overnight. Since this is the first recipe in the book, he very helpfully lays out a timetable of steps to follow, starting with the initial mixing at 8:00 am, and ending with a bake at 5:30 pm.
Ok, now I have a really shameful confession to make. Prior to making this loaf, I had never actually had the courage to make bread entirely by hand. I have always relied on my trusty KitchenAid stand mixer to bring my dough to the windowpane stage. I don't feel bad confessing this now, because making this loaf entirely by hand may have done the trick and set me free from reliance on the machine. This recipe is made by very short intermittent kneading by hand on a lightly oiled surface (to avoid the temptation to overflour the board and lose the benefits of the very wet dough), interspersed with progressively longer rests/rises in a bowl, ending with a about a four hour rise in linen-lined baskets. Each time, the dough is kneaded for 10-15 seconds (which is about 12 strokes), then shaped into a ball before going back in the bowl. Starting out, I was positive the dough was too sticky, that it was never going to come together right. But after reading Dan's book cover to cover, and scouring his website, I had decided to just trust his recipe. This trust was rewarded. As the day progressed, the dough firmed up beautifully. His timing was perfect in a warm kitchen (I was roasting garlic, then later roasting a chicken as I was tending to the dough). By the time the dough was ready to go into the oven, it was fully risen and so strong it barely deflated at all when I scored the top.
These are, hands down, the best loaves I have ever baked. When I pulled the first loaf out of the oven and set it on a wire rack to cool, it immediately started crackling, with a sound like quietly crumpling paper. In all my bread baking to date, my loaves have never made such a distinctive sound as they started to cool. I knew immediately that I had done something right. I peeled the other loaf into the oven, and hovered over the first loaf as it cooled, listening and smelling. Somehow, this loaf, made from only flour, water, leaven, and salt, managed to smell intensely of roasted peanut butter.
This bred is sublime. The crust is thin and cracklingly crusty, the crumb is light and airy without being overly marked with giant holes, and the flavor is amazing. I'm a couple of days removed from making it now, and I still can't believe that I made bread this good entirely by hand.
posted by geekyrandomgirl at 7:24 AM
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