Back again!

After a long hiatus from recording my breadly escapades, I am back in a new space – my adorable Seattle hallway kitchen. There are many non-adorable parts of having a hallway kitchen, most notable the complete and utter lack of counter space, but with a $9.99 Ikea butcher block laid on top of the kitchen table, all is well. I have also acquired a kitchen scale (hallelujah!). It’s not digital and not especially accurate, but it helps a lot, and I got it for less than a dollar at the Goodwill outlet, so I’ll overlook its faults.

So I am back to perfecting my loaves. This time around, I tried using a very wet soaker (350 g whole wheat flour and 550 g water) that I let sit for about a half hour. I then added 650 g organic hi-gluten flour and 100 g water. I think it was too wet – sort of surprising, as 70% water is pretty normal – but I ended up then overcompensating with kneading in slightly too much flour, so it ended up not mattering.

The end result was sort of decent. One of the loaves baked up very nicely, expanded in all the right places and looked like a real artisan loaf. The other wasn’t so lucky – it expanded, but didn’t really grow into the score I had cut. The shaping was probably off. The saddest thing was that, due to being spoiled by convection ovens in my upbringing, the one on the bottom burned on the bottom, and the one on the top burned on the top. Blah. The loaves were also quite dense. Not sure if that’s due to shaping or rising or proofing or just that there was a lot of whole wheat flour (that’s actually pretty old, so maybe I should think about throwing it out…). Anyway, it was edible, and that’s all that matters ☺