I gave the whole wheat bread recipe in The Bread Baker’s Apprentice by Peter Reinhart another shot yesterday. My previous attempt while visiting my sister was mediocre, but I thought I’d give it another shot because I really want to find a great wheat bread recipe and I was sure I could improve on my past experience by making a few important changes.
The last time I made this loaf it turned out dense and small, though with a decent flavor. I have since spent a lot of time looking at the recipe and thinking about what I might have done incorrectly. I came up with three mistakes that I wanted to correct: 1) the recipe calls for some coarsely ground whole wheat flour, and we used finely ground whole wheat flour in its place; 2) the recipe calls for instant yeast and we were using active dry yeast, so we increased the amount of yeast by 25% but neglected to activate the yeast before adding it; and 3) as we were kneading we added extra flour to keep the dough from sticking to our hands.
On Friday the last of the most previous loaf of Light Wheat Bread (also from the Reinhart book) was finished up, so I whipped out my wheat grinder and ground up the required amount of wheat for the Whole Wheat Bread recipe, using my kitchen scale to accurately measure the wheat. I ground some on what my grinder says is "coarse" (it looked about the same to me, but I didn’t inspect it terribly closely) and the rest as finely as my grinder will grind. I made the soaker and poolish, remembering to activate my yeast before adding it to the poolish, and let them rest overnight. The next day I mixed up the rest of the ingredients, again activating the yeast before adding it. I added no extra flour, and in fact added a little more water while kneading. Instead of flouring my hands and my kneading surface, I used wet hands (this is an amazing trick (thanks, Hans) – the dough won’t stick to your hands if they are wet which I never would have thought of). The dough easily and quickly passed the windowpane test, and so I let it rise. After it had risen I divided the dough into 2 equal parts (each roughly 18 oz) and formed them into loaves, placing them in my pans.
This is where things started to go south.
The recipe says it makes two 1-lb loaves, and so I dutifully placed each of my formed loaves in its own loaf pan. What I didn’t know was that my loaf pans are NOT 1-lb loaf pans. Apparently they are more like 1.5 lb loaf pans, or possibly 2 lb (though my bread mentor says most likely they are 1.5 lb pans). I followed the instructions in the recipe, waiting for my bread to "crest above the lip of the pan". I waited the specified 90 minutes without the loaf rising nearly this high, figured it must just be extra cold in my house, and kept on waiting. And waiting, and waiting, and waiting. Unfortunately, I waited so long that by the time I finally gave up and put the loaves in the oven, they were so over-proofed that they fell while baking. The picture below was taken just before putting them in the oven:
Flat topped bread is not very pretty to look at.
Fortunately for me, the loaves, while flat on top from falling and rather wide and stumpy from being in the wrong sized pan, still tasted wonderful. They were not dense, nor were they jaw-tiring to chew. The flavor was excellent (notice I say was – we’ve already polished off the first loaf) and my children and husband all enjoy the bread thoroughly. I’ll be making this again, probably this week. But this time I’ll be portioning the dough a bit differently. I think I’ll make one loaf using about 3/4 of the dough and put it in my regular loaf pan and then use the remaining dough to make mini loaves (or one loaf, depending on how much dough is left). And I’ll be going off the dough response instead of the height of the rise to know when to bake it.
Stay tuned. 🙂
