- 350g Waitrose Duchy Organic Stoneground Wholemeal Flour
- 350g Matthews Cotswold Strong White Flour
- 511g water – 73%
- 14g salt
- 10g yeast
It’s a warm Sunday, but not quite as hot as it was earlier this week. With the temperature expected to hit 29º, my kitchen was about 24º when I started making bread. I started early – around 7:30 – and opened a window for a while, before it got too warm.
This is my second loaf with my new Ankarsrum mixer. I wanted to finish off a bag of Waitrose Wholemeal Flour, so I repeated my recipe of June 27, with half of that flour and half strong white bread flour, raising the yeast back to 10g. That loaf tasted great, though there were some esthetic issues.
After autolyse of about 20 minutes, I turned on the Ankarsrum, and the dough was very dense, too dense to go around the roller. I added a bit of water, which is always difficult in a mixer of any kind – with the Ank, I found that cutting the dough into many pieces with a dough scraper made it easier – then, after a few minutes, the dough was too wet. Sigh. So I added a bit of flour, and when I took the dough out of the Ank after about 12 minutes, it felt like a normal high-hydration dough. Maybe autolysing the dough wasn’t a good idea, because with the added water and added flour, it was about the same hydration as when I started.
Bulk fermentation was quicker than usual because of the kitchen temperature, and in-pan rise took about the same time as usual. There’s excellent oven spring, though the scoring looks about the same as the June 27 loaf: it is split, but it didn’t expand as much as I would have liked. I need to work on this, as some of my loaves have that expansion – none that are on this blog – but most don’t.
I usually bake my loaves for 45 minutes: 25 minutes with the top of the bread cloche on, then 20 minutes with it off. At the end of the 45 minutes, the bread wasn’t as brown as usual, so I baked it for another 10 minutes. It turned out quite well, with a nice crumb and nice oven spring, but it’s not as good as I hoped. As a second loaf with the Anakrsrum, this is very good, but I need to learn more about using this mixer.
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