Sunday, October 3, 2010

BBA Challenge Bread #40—White Bread

white bread crumb

Another out-of-sequence bread from the challenge. I skipped to this one because I had limited about of time to bake and wanted to take advantage of it. This bread is completed in just one day, so it fit the bill. Easy, delicious and versatile — BBA White Bread (Variation 2).


I'm ALMOST DONE baking my way through Peter Reinhart's award winning book, The Bread Baker's Apprentice, along with a number of other amateur bakers (I'm not sure how many are still with us, and a number of us have finished). Want to learn more about it? Check out the following links:
The Bread Baker's Apprentice offers three variations on white bread, playing with a few ingredients and methods. Breads 1 and 2 are almost identical with the exception of milk. #1 used powdered and #2 uses buttermilk. Variation 3 uses a sponge method – mixing the flour, yeast and whole milk and letting that sit for 45 minutes before moving on to the rest of the process. 

One of my oft-made pre-challenge bread recipes was for a buttermilk bread, so I opted for Variation 2. Not that I have the others to compare with, but I think I made the right choice.

Here's the ingredient round up. Bread flour, buttermilk powder (love this stuff!), salt, butter, yeast, egg, sugar and water.

whitebread-ingredients

Mix all that up, knead, pop it in a greased bowl and let it ferment 1-1/2 to 2 hours or until doubled.

whitebread-mixed

whitebread-ferment

Shape it into a boule...

whitebread-shaped

And let it double in size.

whitebread-proofedinDO

I decided to leave all 36.44 ounces of this dough as one giant boule. I just bought a crazy cheap Dutch oven and wanted to put it to use.

dutch oven

The good folks at America's Test Kitchen tweeted about their Dutch oven test and a surprising recommendation was revealed. It turns out WalMart had one for about $40 and it fared well in their tests. I immediately went on line and snatched one up. I didn't want to risk not finding one at my local store, so I shipped one right to my door. It did a bang up job!

whitebread-baked

I thought this bread was very tasty. Soft, tender and entirely too easy to just eat and eat. It's definitely worth repeating.

Check out some other BBA baker's white bread variations:

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