Saturday, May 12, 2007

The Cold Rise

It's been a while, I know. I haven't been baking or cooking much lately - it's a long story. I have moved house, and hopefully I'll be able to bake more now that I'm not contending with people on diets.

I made this today. It's just your basic white bread, but after reading The Underground Baker's latest post where she mentioned that she put her bread dough in the fridge for a generous amount of time to develop the sugars, I decided to try a different technique. I rose this in the fridge. Yeast will rise in the fridge, but it will take much longer. I shaped this loaf and put it in the pan, covered it with plastic wrap, and put it in the fridge for three and a half hours. By that time it had doubled in size, and the dough was sturdy and scored very easily. Oftentimes, I find, that warm-risen loaves I've made at home have deflated quite a bit upon scoring or been too gooey to score well.

I'm getting used to a new oven here in my new home. It's a cooler oven, i.e. 350F on the dial is probably more like 300F. I cranked the heat up and put the loaf in. 16 minutes later, I had this. It rose quite a bit more during the baking process and came out quite gorgeously coloured.

It's a funky shape, I know, but I am very pleased with this. It looks very artisanal and was nice and crusty on the outside and soft on the inside. And it tasted great.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great to see you post! And as always your bread is beautiful!

mister anchovy said...

wow, it looks spectacular!!

David T. Macknet said...

What an awesome idea! Very cool!

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