More than a week ago, I mixed up my first batch of the master boule dough recipe from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day: the Discovery that Revolutionizes Home Baking by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois. I thought the results were a little disappointing. While I certainly admit fault for the loaf being way too salty, the crust and crumb left a lot of room for improvement.I baked that first suboptimal loaf a mere 24 hours after making the dough. I was hopeful that the dough would improve with time, so last night I baked another loaf from the very same batch of dough. This time, ten days had passed since I made the dough. I also decided to bake the bread in a dutch oven (instead of on a baking stone as I did with the previous loaf, as is recommended by the authors), since I wanted the bread to bake in a steamier environment to hopefully create a better crust.
I took the dough from the fridge, shaped it, let it rise for about 90 minutes, and then put it in a preheated Le Creuset dutch oven. I baked the loaf for 30 minutes with the lid on, and another 10 minutes with the lid off to give the bread some color. The end result was very different from that first loaf I baked last week. This time, the bread had the very thick chewy crust that one expects with an artisan loaf. In addition, the crumb was significantly improved. Last night's loaf had larger air bubbles of varying size, as opposed to the one from last week, which looked fairly uniform, more like sandwich bread. I'm not sure how much of the improvement in this loaf can be credited to the extra week the dough spent in the fridge, and how much is due to baking the bread in the dutch oven. Regardless, I'm definitely going to stick with the dutch oven from now on. It's just easier.
This loaf was, of course, still too salty. I still can't tell what the flavor of the loaf would be like without the salt -- it might be flavorless, or it might be really tasty. I mixed up a new batch of dough (with less salt!), and put it in the same plastic container with the leftover dough from the last batch. Mixing in the old dough should help accelerate the flavor development in the new dough. I'm going to wait a few days before baking another loaf, and hopefully this time I'll get both the texture and the flavor right!Recipe: "Master Recipe: Boule" from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day: the Discovery that Revolutionizes Home Baking by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois.
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