Blooming baking

I've been watching Paul Hollywood's Bread series on the BBC and feeling like giving hand made bread a go. I'm not entirely new to bread making, we had a fantastic Panasonic bread maker back in Australia and would regularly make our own bread in that. For years now on most weekends, when we are home, I make homemade pizza one night, making the bases from scratch. However on the few occasions in the past that I've tried to make an actual loaf by hand it's fallen flat, literally, I end up with an unintentionally heavy bread with a line of uncooked dough towards the base. Over the last twelve months though I think I've finally learnt how to knead by hand properly though and my pizza bases have improved from that. So I'm ready to try again.

When I sat at my desk this morning looking for inspiration as to what I would do today I looked at my new weekly goal list, and there it was 'bake a fruit and walnut loaf'. So in the absence of feeling any more creative than that, bread it was.

Goal list seems to be working

Checked out Paul's recipe on line and got to it. I'm using the recipe for Bloomer and a few things are different than my usual basic bread dough recipe (I make my pizza bases following Jamie Oliver's basic bread recipe). Firstly salt, specifically the volume of salt seems like a lot, as does the oil, but I'll follow true to the recipe for this firs time at least. Secondly it uses cold water rather than tepid, so the rising will take a lot longer, I'm guessing there's some sciency reason here about proving slower making better texture or something, so I'll follow that too. Lastly, there's no sugar, I always thought there had to be to feed the yeast? One thing this reveals is I haven't been paying much attention at all when watching the show! The one change I have made is making it 20% wholemeal rather than all white.

So measuring and following recipe, and I make a blunder at the first hurdle (I seem to have a problem following recipes!) I miss read 40ml of olive oil as 40g, and after pouring it in, and then looking at the volume of oil on top of the flour I realised and tried to scoop some back. Then went ahead an mixed it, it looked, and felt awful.

Blech play dough

It wouldn't come together and felt really dense, I tasted a bit, yep I'd made play dough. I didn't want to spend 5hrs waiting for this to rise, and then bake to make something inedible so I called it and threw it in the bin.

Do over. I don't think my trusty bargain priced IKEA scales are sensitive enough to measure the salt, so I found these great substitution tables at Kitchen Geek and worked out the 10g of salt equates to 1.5 tspns - which still looks a lot to me, but then again in the first batch I've now realised I measured 40g of salt! I also double checked my spoon measures to ensure I had the oil measured right this time (this still looks a lot too).

This at least seems a lot more like dough. Something else different here is the recipe states to oil the board and knead on the oil rather than flour it, the dough already seemed so oily but I went with it. Which it was a much easier knead than usual and I'll start doing this with my pizza dough. After 10mins kneading the dough looked less oily than at first. So now to see how long cold dough without sugar takes to rise to triple the size?

Starting size

Hmm, four hours later and it's only doubled not tripled - continue and bake brick, or bake lighter loaf at midnight? Having just read this great list of tips on 'How to fix dough that won't rise' on Wiki How, I'm going to try warming it a little more (its in the boiler room, so I've hit boost on the tank). I'll give it half an hour and otherwise go with double - maybe it's the wholemeal flour I added, maybe it was too much salt?

So I settled on double

After four hours of proving, I decided it was now or never. Did the second knead and then formed it into the Bloomer shape. I wish I had remembered at this point to take another photo, of this dismal looking little loaf, but unfortunately it had taken so long to prove I was too busy making dinner!
Beyond all expectations after just under (another) two hours, it was like a proper sized Bloomer!

I followed Paul's instructions of adding a water tray to the bottom of the oven, and spraying the loaf with water, both to provide a crisp crust, and an (almost) perfect (except a bit too spread out) Bloomer!

It cut fantastically, nice even bake (why thankyou Mary), the crust is perfect, and it tastes delicious (especially slightly warm with butter and Vegemite!)

Very encouraging starting point, can't wait to try the next another loaf.

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