Actually baking!

Very excitingly, I'm getting to see my family this weekend for the first time since the very first lockdown last year. A lot has happened recently, but one of the many interesting things is that my brother has bought and moved into a new house - so although it's not the excuse for meeting up, it's still also sort of a housewarming. So I thought I'd do the whole bread-and-salt thing (I never knew about this until I bought a house and suddenly was inundated with more bread than I could eat in one go and more salt than I knew what to do with, but I still think it's a lovely tradition). Time for Aage to shine!

Housewarming Loaf

Ingredients

• 150g Strong wholemeal flour
• 100g Aage
• 400ml Water
• 450g Strong white flour
• 13g Salt

Method

1. Make a poolish: Mix the wholemeal flour, Aage and 150g of the water in a bowl and cover tightly with cling film. Leave in the refrigerator overnight.
2. Autolyse: Mix the white flour with the remaining 250g water to form a dough. Wrap the bowl in a bin bag and leave on the counter overnight.
3. 8:45am: Add the salt to the dough, and knead the poolish in until fully combined and homogenous. Wrap bowl in bin bag and leave to rise.
4. 9:30am: Perform first set of stretch-and-folds.
5. 10am: Perform second set of stretch-and-folds.
6. 10:30am: Perform third set of stretch-and-folds.
7. 1pm: Knead dough and shape, placing on a parchment square in a bowl. Leave to prove.
8. 8pm: Preheat oven on max setting with cast iron combo cooker inside.
9. 8:30pm: Transfer to preheated combo cooker. Turn oven down to 210C and bake for 20 minutes.*
10. 8:50pm: Remove top of combo cooker and continue to bake for a further 20 minutes.

*I was intending to score the top of the loaf before putting it in the oven - but naturally, I completely forgot. Oh well...

Here is the dough post-prove, about to go into the oven. As you can see, it's pretty much a liquid, so I decided to pop it into the deep side of the combo cooker rather than the shallow side, as I wasn't sure it would stay within the confines of the lid.

Isn't this a gorgeous loaf? I think this might be one of the best looking loaves I've ever baked actually - it's a real shame that I forgot to score the top. Such a pleasing colour to it. I don't think that I got the bake quite right - the crust seems incredibly thin, and I'm not actually certain that it's cooked all the way through, so I'm fairly certain I should have given it a bit longer in the oven. But never mind all that for now - look how pretty it is!

It definitely could have done with a little longer in the oven, but actually, it turned out pretty well! Not a bad crumb, though I suspect it was a little over-proved, but certainly not disastrously so.