We ran out of our stumpy loaves of whole wheat bread last week, so I made some more. It went fairly well, though I’m still not ready to call it great.
I did make a few modifications from my previous attempt:
1) More water. This was mostly by accident. I added probably an extra 2-3 oz of water. Then, because I didn’t want to grind more flour, I didn’t add any extra flour to offset the extra water. This meant the dough was rather more wet than I would have liked, but I figured this bread was a work in progress and I could stand to have an over-wet loaf to see how it would perform.
2) Less rising time. This time I didn’t let it rise forever. Instead, I put it in when the dough was ready to bake, which did work out to be about 90 minutes after shaping.
3) I made one large loaf in my big pan and 1 small loaf in my mini loaf pan. The mini loaf weighed about 6 1/2 oz when I portioned it. I was shooting for 9 oz, but figured that was close enough.
I still wasn’t terribly happy about the height of the loaf, though it was certainly better than last time. I’m still not convinced my loaf pan is 1.5 lb and I may try the whole recipe in the pan next time, just to see if I can get it nice and high like I want. My pan does have rather wide and sloped sides so it is spreading out quite a bit. Also, I think that since the dough was so wet it looked like it may have spread a little more than I liked. That’s a terrible description of what I actually saw but I can’t figure out how to describe what it did. It was almost like the top around the edges was bubbly or something. š
So anyway – we’ll eat this loaf and I’ll try again. It still tastes great, in spite of the visual problems. As always, a work in progress.
