Yesterday I had a small bread-and-tea event (only 2 people besides me)—the events really don’t work as well on Zoom as on-campus, where the smell of the freshly baked bread fills the hallways. On Zoom, I can’t share the bread I bake.
The bread I made yesterday was not a particularly special recipe, but I tried baking it differently. Instead of using a loaf pan or shaping the loaf on baking parchment, I just left it in the mixing bowl that it had been rising in, and baked it there.
I started the bread on Thursday, but baked it Friday afternoon. I did not measure all the ingredients, so the numbers here are approximate:
1 cup sourdough starter
2 cups bread flour
2 cups warm water
2 Tablespoons sugar
Use the dough hook of the mixer to mix the ingredients (they are too liquid to make a dough). Let the sponge rise for a couple of hours, then take out a cup of it to save as the next starter. To the rest add
2 teaspoons salt
2 Tablespoons olive oil
While mixing with the dough hook, gradually add
2½ cups whole-wheat flour
The goal is to get a dough that is elastic but still slightly sticky. Turn the dough out onto a counter floured with whole-wheat flour and knead by hand for a couple of minutes, keeping the dough lightly floured to keep it from sticking. This used another
½ cup whole-wheat flour
and resulted in a soft and elastic dough that was not too sticky. Put it in a mixing bowl with a little olive oil and turn it to coat the ball of dough with oil. Let it rise overnight with a damp cloth covering the bowl. After a couple of hours the dough had doubled in size, but shaking the bowl a little deflated it, without needing to punch it down.
In the morning, grease a different stainless-steel mixing bowl with
cocoanut oil (or butter)
and turn the dough into the new bowl. The dough again deflated on being transferred from one bowl to the other. Let it rise in the new bowl for 4 hours. Bake at 375°F for about an hour (until the center of the load is around 195°F). I turned the loaf out of the bowl then to bake another ten minutes on terra cotta tiles, but that may not be necessary.

Here is the baked bread still in the mixing bowl it was baked in.

Turning the bread out onto the tiles was very easy. I could have just cooled the bread at that point, but I decided to bake it a little longer to make the crust a little crisper.

The bread cooling on the rack shows the nice color and shape from the unusual loaf pan.
The bread had a slightly softer crust than some of my sourdoughs (as expected from using a pan), but the crumb was excellent—the somewhat soft dough and gentler handling of the bread before the final rising probably helped.
Like this:
Like Loading...