Hello baking friends. I thought I would share with you a few things about my grand attempt today to be adventurous and well, brave. I have a favorite recipe for traditional white/wheat bread that also uses eggs, oil, sugar, grated carrot, and raisons. And of course two packages of powdered dry yeast. I wanted to swap out the dry yeast for some of my now very abundant sourdough poolish. So here's what happened.....
First I had to convert all ingredients to metric and then weigh them out. Of course the original recipe is not written this way. I immediately realized I had an issue with the fact that the only water in recipe is 1/2 cup, to be mixed with dry yeast. So I ended up using 240 grams of poolish, out of that came the 120 water I'm allowed. Into a large bowl went the poolish, 120g of whole wheat flour, and and 420g of white flour. I mixed just these ingredients to autolyse together but they were very dry!! I then realized I had mistakenly used 420 of bread flour, when I meant to use all-purpose. So I threw it all away and started over.
Ok, now I have in bowl the right ingredients, still very dry. I let them sit for 15 or 30 minutes while I got the other ingredients of oil, egg, sugar, salt, carrots, spices. Mixed those in the bowl, using the lift and fold in place for a while. Rested 10 minutes.
Now I pulled the sticky dough out and put on wood board. Stretch and fold a few times, then made a ball and put in greased bowl.
Around 3 1/2 hours later, I took out, divided into loaves, did quick stretch and fold, put in greased earthenware pans. Ambient room temperature 74 degrees.
Let rise for 2 hours, Not a lot of height as pictured. The finger poke test was medium spring so I had to move along with my day and put them in oven 350 degrees.
In the oven here. Sorry for reflection ruining shot.
So here is one finished bread, still cooling. I will fill you all in on how it appears inside and most importantly, how it tastes. Of course it was not until the whole thing was in oven did I watch the final minutes of the conversion video, where Jacob specifically says "if the recipe is high in sugar (over 10%), the lactobacillis are NOT happy. Oops!!! Next time I guess I will have to add a small amount of commercial yeast to overcome this issue? Jacob, advice here please : )
