Baby Steps … to Bread

The Story

Well, I’ll credit this bake to “Great Saves” and keep on marching. It started off as a normal sourdough bake using King Arthur Bread Flower (60%) and Central Milling Old World Flour, (30%) with a splash of King Arthur Golden Whole Wheat (10%). All was good and I started my new routine of working the dough just 30 minutes after Autolyse. Speaking of Autolyse, I actually mixed the flours and water the night before and tried for the first time letting it sit overnight to hydrate. I really liked the result and will incorporate that into future bakes when time allows.

So…I performed three sets of stretching, three-minutes each, separated by three-minutes. This is something I came across from “The Sourdough Journey” website as a take on the Tartine Method, revised. It works very well and I see other bakers incorporating more early dough development into their routines as a result.

I can’t remember the details….I just know that having finished up the early stretches I didn’t return to the house until after 5 pm that day. I was gone for a good seven or eight hours and my bakery, being in the garage, got up to 84 degrees that day. Needless to say the dough over-fermented and I still needed to add the inclusions. I thought about tossing the whole mess but decided to do my best and use a loaf pan during baking.

Excited to try the new Cayenne/Jalapeno Cheese, and knowing that both my wife and I love dried cherries, I dumped the whole mess into the dough and just started some desperate stretch and folds to incorporate everything.

This almost worked, but I had chunks of cheese and cherries popping out everywhere. I then did my best to roll it up into the batard shape and into a Banneton it went for the overnight Cold Retard. I thought about using the loaf pan at this point but I was hoping the Banneton would better contain everything.

The next morning I moved the dough into a USA Pan Loaf Pan and let it rise until even with the top of the pan. I didn’t know if it had much rise left after the over-proofing but I did get some activity going in my warm kitchen. I then baked at 400 degrees for 30 minutes, and then took the lid off to further darken the bake. By “Lid”, I mean another loaf pan turned upside down to contain the steam during the first part of the bake.

Conclusion

Everything turned out amazing! Baking in the loaf pan saved the day and the bread tasted great! I sliced it up, froze half, and we’ve been eating it for the last few days. The overall spice/heat was not too bad so my wife thought it was fine. Sometimes I overdo it when making Jalapeno/Cheddar so I am trying to scale back the heat.

So the lesson learned is when you have a gooey mess on your hands, slop it into a loaf pan and do your best. As long as you bake to an internal temperature of 200-plus, it should be okay.