thepelkus

This dough had me worried at a few different points: my scale only goes to .5g of accuracy, so there was a decent margin of error on the ascorbic acid, and I had some pretty wet, sticky doughs for a while there, that didn't seem terribly intent on maintaining much structure, forming "surface tension" / boule skins, etc; maybe I didn't knead / develop the gluten as much as I should've. And my first boule didn't get quite as much rise as I would've liked. But the second—with an extra 45 minutes of proofing—seemed to develop a little better in the oven. (Dutch oven for both, FWIW.) That said, the would-be lesser of the two disappeared plenty quick at friendsgiving last night, so I'm not losing any sleep over it. I did have a question (probably more than one, but there's only one I can remember at the moment): loading temperature? Is that just for brick / wood-fired ovens? Or is that something that applies to the average home range, too? (I'm on a humdrum electric range.)

Time to throw my hat in the bread rings! Since life and bread schedules aren't always compatible, I threw this in the fridge once all of the ingredients were mixed after the autolyse, then I added an extra half hour and four edge fold to the bulk ferment phase. I'm pretty happy with how both loaves came out! (Size difference mostly due to uneven dividing, though I think I got a little more rise out of the second loaf with the longer proof; I did these one at a time in a dutch oven.) I will note that the bottoms of these (and my country-style loaves) came out a little blacker than I'm used to. I followed the cooking times to a tee, which are a little longer than I'm used to, for better or worse. That said, I like the color I got on the rest of the bread, and the bottoms weren't inedible or anything, so I'm not sure how much I care?