Baking Experiment #1

After a year of hibernation from baking, I'm finally back. My goal is still the same as last time though, to make a European traditional bread, in another words Artisan's bread. When I said European, it means the hydration level is at least 75% and above. For example, if I use 100g of flour, I'll be using 75g of water. When I mentioned traditional it means the bread only consists of flour, water, salt and yeast.

For this time, I tried using 80% hydration. If you haven't figured that out, let me tell you, the dough is really wet and sticky. Extremely hard to handle, the best way to cope up with this is to use mixer to replace kneading and folding techniques for the shaping (which I am new to).

This was how the dough looked like before rising and baking

After rising and baking

Cooled & Sliced

Texture

The texture wasn't what I wanted. I wanted a fluffy and dry texture, instead it was dense and soggy. It was a failure.

Lessons Learnt:

1) Extend baking time to 30-40 minutes until it's dark brown

2) the importance of folding on wet dough

Anyway, I got myself a new baby! It's the "scrapper" also known as the "Bench Knife"!