Insomnia bread

I've been sleeping pretty dreadfully this last week, and while it's been getting better over the last few nights, I've still been waking up at unpleasant hours of the night and being unable to sleep. Last night, I woke up about 4am, and by about 6am it was clear that I wasn't getting back to sleep in a hurry, so I decided to get up and get a sourdough loaf going. Given that I started this at silly o'clock, and it's been a while since I last tried baking bread, I thought I'd better keep this one simple, but it's nice to get back to doing bread. I think this is also my first loaf since getting my hands on a stand mixer, which makes life much, much easier!

Insomnia Bread
Ingredients

• 200g Aage*
• 300ml Water
• 400g Strong wholemeal flour
• 6g Salt

Method

1. Mix Aage, 200ml water and 200g flour in a bowl.
2. Wrap in a bin bag and leave to rise for ~8.5hrs.
3. Add the remaining 200g flour and 100ml water, and the salt.
4. Knead in the stand mixer with a dough hook until the dough comes together and stops sticking to the sides.
5. Knead briefly by hand**, return to the mixing bowl and rewrap in the bin bag.
6. Leave to prove in a warm place for ~3.5hrs.
7. Place a Dutch oven*** in the oven and preheat to 220C (as hot as the oven allows).
8. Transfer the dough to the Dutch oven, sprinkle with water and close up.
9. Turn the oven down to 180C and bake for ~25mins.
10. Uncover and bake for a further ~10 mins.

*In case anyone is new or has forgotten, Aage is my sourdough starter. He's fed entirely with wholemeal flour, and is typically about 50% hydration, though I always feed him by eye, so this does vary quite a bit...

**I find that once the dough has reached a certain point, the stand mixer doesn't really do anything because the dough wraps itself around the hook and just whirls around as a solid ball. By this point though, the hard work has been done, and it's pretty easy and quick to finish off the kneading by hand.

***My Dutch oven is actually a Lodge combo cooker. It's absurdly expensive in the UK (£74 on Amazon UK at the time of writing), but also absurdly cheap in the US ($34.90). Definitely worth getting at the American price, but almost certainly not at the British price!

This one tasted absolutely lovely - just the right amount of sourness - but the texture wasn't quite right. I had noticed that the dough was a bit overly wet (I think I was being a bit overly optimistic on hydration levels this time around), but I failed to account for it in the bake. As a result, it was really rather doughy in the middle - it could really have done with much longer in the oven uncovered to help dry it out - but not unpleasantly so. Not a perfect loaf, but still pretty darned tasty!