Quote:
Originally Posted by lilmizcheezcake
I just baked my first loaf of leavened bread yesterday but since I have never had any experience with leavened bread of any kind I have no idea if it turned out the way it should. This is a photo of my loaf,
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v2...Picture002.jpg
I cooked it in my cast iron pan so that is why it has a round shape. It turned out very dense and thick but in my option, is still good to eat and satisfying, in fact my kids loved it! My five year old asked for slice after slice! The only one who didn’t enjoy it was my husband who said he wasn’t into “the wheat thing.”
I have baked bread with store bought yeast and I keep thinking that my leavened bread didn’t rise enough? I let it rise for eight hours as the recipe stated, but does it look as if it rose properly? Is leavened bread supposed to be dense and thick or is it supposed to more closely resemble the texture of regular home baked breads? Thanks for any help you may be able to provide.
Lil Miz  |
Okay, Lil Miz,
Congratulations on your first natural leaven loaf!
Which recipe did you use?
Tell us more about your husband.
What does his diet consist of now?
If his diet is too rich, he might not be hungry enough to appreciate whole grains and his taste buds might be dull.
Depending on the generation of a sourdough culture, you might need to take longer to cold proof your dough.
If it is a young sourdough, for sure, but if you have produced many, many batches of bread with your culture then the proofing time will lessen.
Jacques de Langre who baked bread regularly for decades, developed a culture that produced a dough ready to bake in a couple of hours.
Bread that is unleavened in a brick form, will be almost as hard as a rock; first generation culture bread proofed for eight hours may be somewhat dense, so when working with young cultured batches of dough, you will need to proof the dough for longer periods of time (and if you don't want the bread to have a distinctly strong sourdough taste then you will want to knead the dough after eight hours to release the excess gas).
You should sample some other baker's natural leavened bread to get an idea about what's possible.
Have you been to one of the
Essential Baking Company outlets?
Read
this about artisan baking companies on Seattle.
If you can afford it, you could have
Lynn Gordon send you one or more of her natural leavened breads if you want macro quality.
Make sure that the bread is unsliced!
Happy baking and/or sampling!
Thank you, very much.
Bruce Paine