2020-03-04

I want to have bread tomorrow morning, so while my coffee was brewing this morning I put

• ¾ of Juliette into the bread machine,
• added 1c warm water and
• 1c white bread flour

and set it to “dough” program. It’ll stir the mixture into something the consistency of pancake batter and keep it warm to rise. This intermediate batter has several names: poolish, biga, "ambrosia batter" or pre-ferment. I'm going to use the latter. Rosie had a Q: Do I need a bread machine?

Then to refresh Juliette I added ¼c warm water and ¼c Speerville organic whole wheat flour to her dish and mixed it really well with my littlest rubber scraper. If I wanted bread again on Friday, I’d leave Juliette out on the counter or on top of the bread machine, but I think I’m going to skip a day so I’ll put her back in the fridge.

So I anticipate that by late afternoon the pre-ferment will be bubbling well, and I'll add in the rest of the ingredients and mix it a bit. I think tomorrow I want something more like an italian loaf so I'll add some milk powder and some kind of oil.

AddPhoto : pre-ferment in the pan

So at around 1:00pm, I noticed that the pre-ferment was risen to twice its size so I decided to go to the next step.

Breadmaking is largely, except for salt, very forgiving in quantities. So, just to keep track of quantities:

• Refreshing the Juliette starter means adding ¼c water and ¼c whole wheat flour to maybe 2tbl of starter in her dish and mixing well.
• I use ¾ of Juliette for each batch of bread. So that’s ¼c each of water and flour that I start with.
• I added 1c water and 1c flour to start the pre-ferment so I now have 1¼c of each in the bowl.
• To make bread from 1¼c liquid, I need 3½ c flour. I already have 1¼c flour in the bowl so I add approximately another 2¼c flour
• This will make two loaves a little under 1lb each
• I add 1 tsp of salt.

I’ll give you the rules of thumb for the flour to liquid ratio tomorrow.

Purist baguettes are made from just flour, water, starter and salt, but I feel like making something like Italian bread so I added ¼c of milk powder and 2 tbl of butter, and 1 tbl of Splenda. If I’d known what I was going to make, I could have started with 1c of warm milk instead of the water.

If I was mixing this by hand I’d stir it with the handle of a wooden spoon for about five minutes, but instead I just hit the “Dough” program on the bread machine and let it run for 10 minutes and then stop it - we want it stirred, not kneaded.

I started the sponge at about 8:30 so we can see that in my kitchen, today, that starter has a rise time of about 4½ hours. By 1:15 the dough was back in the bowl so I can guess that I’m going to work with it again around supper time.

I’ll talk about [[Rise_Times?]] on a future day.

AddPhoto: pan + blob of dough

As I guessed, the dough rose about halfway in the last 4 hours. So now I'm going to cut it in half, roughly shape it, let it sit for a half hour, do the final shape and put in the pan for its final rise and put it in the fridge to rise overnight.

AddPhoto: unrisen dough in pan