Loaf 28 – Lean Bread Done Right

Posted on Mar 5, 2012 in loaves

With all my new knowledge I felt like it was time to take another pass at Reinhart’s Lean Bread recipe – the one I used in Loaf 16 that made me mad at bread.

Success! (Mostly.)

Between then and now I’ve learned a lot about measuring ingredients, and I discovered that I wasn’t measuring my salt correctly (see my next post “It’s the Salt, Stupid” about that). My prior attempt had only about 75% of the correct amount of salt in it, which made it devoid of flavor.

I made the same types of loaves as before, three baguettes and a 590g loaf in a banneton. I rolled the baguettes much thinner to experiment with that, but otherwise I was aiming for a straight comparison with Loaf 16.

My challenge this time was with shaping the banneton loaf and scoring all the loaves. The dough stuck to the bottom of the banneton when I flipped it over, causing it to deform on it’s way to the pizza peel. I thought I had enough cornmeal on the peel, but it also stuck to that when I was transferring to the pizza stone in the over. The net result was that the banneton loaf went from beautiful to severely deformed in about two minutes. Grrr. I also had challenges scoring with my lame – it grabbed and tore rather than slicing, resulting in horrific scars atop all four loaves.

The flavor of the loaves was fantastic, particularly the larger banneton loaf where you could get a good balance of crust and interior crumb. The crusts were all a bit too soft, I’m not sure why. We ate a baguette before dinner (“sampling”) and half the banneton with dinner (“eating”). I also used the banneton loaf for an incredible roast beef sandwich the next day. Now that I have that pesky salt measurement thing figured out, this recipe is a winner!

Lessons

• More flour in the banneton! This should prevent the first sticking event that distorted the loaf and help get a more even crumb inside.
• More cornmeal on the pizza peel, or go back to parchment paper. Either way, I need to get the loaf into the oven without incident.
• I’d like to figure out how to get the crust crispier.
• I know I can score a loaf of bread, I did 30 of them last weekend successfully. I’m going to blame the tool (for now) and get a new one with a sharper blade.