Thought I’d log a few new things when making this bread! which ended up in disaster (I’ve made many French bread loaves following what I had learned and had no problems, but changed a few variables around….I guess I will have to figure out what went wrong ), or go check out a successful recipe here!

new recipe (adjusted ratio closer to 5:3 flour to water)

500g flour
322.5g warm water
7g yeast
7g kosher salt
14g sugar (added to warm water to proof yeast)

A couple of things changed in how i’m making bread now. I added sugar to my recipe, a full table spoon, and i added to my 1.5 cups of water, then i add the yeast until it yields a layer of foam close to half the height of the water level, so make sure your you have a deep enough container for the water.

I got a stand mixer, kitchenaid artisan, just like this one! clearance item at macy’s for $150, it used to be a display item, so it was missing the box an the batter paddle, whatever! I brought it home. Cuts down kneading time tremendously, and no more mess in the kitchen, only thing i have to clean is the bowl and the dough hook, maybe a spatula.

Im also not pressing down on the dough after the second rise, i want to preserve bigger pockets of air, hopefully it will be more flaky, I will find out in a few minutes… (after a few minutes) here is the brilliantly boring looking bread:

The browning on the top seems lacking, the nice golden crust is more like a dull washed out brown, the explanation, too much water was added during baking? i did add more water than usual, which I shouldn’t have, since the dough had more water content than my previous recipe. I went from 2:1 to 5:3, although not necessarily true! because in the previous approach, i wasn’t measuring ingredients by weight, who knows what i was doing then! (worked better though and one more thing, my measuring cup is totally off, 200g of water when it should read close to 250g, that’s a big difference) Ok, back to the bread in question, which not only had a boring looking crust, but also seemed like it didn’t rise enough and was slightly undercooked even though the loaves spent almost 45 minutes if not more in the oven at 415f:

Oven spring, I’ve been reading about it lately, just like in pizza making, bread likes very hot ovens, at least the first few minutes, which i sort of failed at achieving this time, i opened the doors one too many times, i should stick a few bricks in there as well, to maximize radiant heat and kept some moisture to prevent the crust from setting too early preventing the lift.

One last thing, dont score the dough until right before placing the bread in the oven, otherwise the scoring marks will basically disappear, I scored these, but those are virtually gone because I made them before the second rise.

anyway, not really done!

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