Insomnia Bread
Ingredients
- 200g Aage*
- 300ml Water
- 400g Strong wholemeal flour
- 6g Salt
- Mix Aage, 200ml water and 200g flour in a bowl.
- Wrap in a bin bag and leave to rise for ~8.5hrs.
- Add the remaining 200g flour and 100ml water, and the salt.
- Knead in the stand mixer with a dough hook until the dough comes together and stops sticking to the sides.
- Knead briefly by hand**, return to the mixing bowl and rewrap in the bin bag.
- Leave to prove in a warm place for ~3.5hrs.
- Place a Dutch oven*** in the oven and preheat to 220C (as hot as the oven allows).
- Transfer the dough to the Dutch oven, sprinkle with water and close up.
- Turn the oven down to 180C and bake for ~25mins.
- 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!
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!
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