My bread is getting closer.
It is apparent that gluten development is the key to getting the bread I want. Ingredients (e.g. honey, oil, etc.) are nice, but they are peripheral to the key issue of gluten development. The key to gluten development seems to be making sure the flour gets adequately hydrated. The techniques I’ve used so far are:
- autolyse – a 20 minute soaking of the flour in water before kneading
- resting the dough for 10 minutes in the middle of kneading
- really wet dough during kneading (dryer dough doesn’t get kneaded as throughly in the Bosch because of the nature of the machine)
- relatively short kneading time (5-8 minutes)
With the methods I’m using now, I’m pretty happy with my window pane test (i.e. stretching the dough till you get a see-through “window-pane”). It’s not as good as pictures I’ve seen around the net of window-pane tests with white flour dough, but reasonable.
The problem I’m coming up against now is that the dough is too wet when I put it in the loaf pan and overflows during the rise and baking stages. It doesn’t slash well either.
My next attempt will be to add a little more flour at the end of the kneading process after the window pane test is passed. I’m contemplating adding either some barley or brown rice flour to get a lighter result. Since there won’t be much time to develop the gluten in the portion I add at the end, a low-gluten grain should be just fine. There will be about ½ – ¾ cup of this alternative flour.
Recall I’m using a Bosch Universal mixer to knead this dough so your mileage may vary if you’re using another method.
