Sandwich bread

This week, we shall make sandwich bread. I understand that this is the opposite of the best thing in the world to many people, as they believe that anything fantastic is the best thing since sliced bread, and sliced bread is the opposite of making it From Scratch. Those people do not get the smell of freshly baked bread infusing their home, though, so clearly they have no idea what they are talking about. Also, those people probably are eating more preservatives than bread, because real bread doesn't last very long.

This is a very simple recipe, as straight dough is simple to make. The hardest thing about the Straight Dough method is that you either have to have specialized equipment, or you have to have flexibility and patience. For without proofing boxes, you have limited control over how quickly the dough will rise and when it will be ready for shaping and, later, for baking. The actual work is minimal, however.

For this run, I am using King Arthur Flour White Sandwich Bread recipe. I won't replicate it here, as it's easy to get to and allows you to choose if you want to measure by weight or by volume. You should measure by weight, incidentally. For the ingredients:

Take these and put them all in a bowl.

Mix them together until they look properly mixed, something like the following, either by hand or in a mixer with a paddle attachment.

Then knead and knead and knead. I used the dough hook on my mixer, but you could just as easily do this by hand. Reading through the comments from the recipe page, I noticed a couple of people had problems, and one person kneaded minimally because they didn't want to overwork the dough. Poppycock. This is yeast bread. If there is one application in all the world where you need all the gluten you can get, this is the one. In the mixer, I did 7 or so minutes. You want to develop the dough until you can make a windowpane, just as Ben did when he made Pizza Dough.

Once the gluten is developed, take a bowl and lightly grease it. The bowl should be at least big enough to hold your dough with room for the dough to expand to twice its size or more.

Then cover your bowl. If you have a fancy bowl like mine, which has a lid with a tiny hole in it, then you can use that, with the hole opened. This allows the gasses that will be released from the bread to escape without the bowl exploding, while also keeping the dough safe from dust and marauding cats. If not, you can just lightly cover it with some plastic wrap.

Let the dough expand to roughly twice its previous volume. I usually measure the height and make a mark on the inside with my finger. As I'd lightly greased the bowl, it's easy to see the mark and compare.

Lightly release the gas from the dough and roll it into a log. You'll be baking in a pan that's 8.5" x 4.5", so try to make your roll a little smaller than 8". Mine is not, but that's okay. It'll fit.

Put your dough in the pan. Make sure the top of what you put in the pan is smooth, as whatever imperfections are in the dough due to rolling will be present in the final bread, but bigger.

Cover with waxed paper or parchment paper so that the dough can expand without sticking too much to the paper.

And now we wait again. Start preheating your oven to 350°. Let the dough rise to about 1.25" above the top of the pan. Then put the bread into your preheated oven and cook for 15 minutes.

While this is going on, make a tent out of aluminum foil that will cover the top of the bread without, preferably, touching it. I did something like the following, which proves that making pretty things out of aluminum foil is not my strength.

Once the bread has cooked for 15 or so minutes, cover with the tent and finish baking. Should be 20-25 minutes, until the interior of the bread reads 190°F or more.

Take the bread out. You could take the tent off and let it brown more then I did, but at this point it was midnight and I really wanted to get to sleep.

Did I mention that you have to be patient and flexible with bread? It's true. I started this around 7, but it's cold in the winter time and it takes bread a bit more time to rise than usual. If you can, start the bread making in the morning. There are tricks to getting bread to rise faster (more yeast, storing in a warmer place, malt syrup, etc.), but the real goal is to have the time and flexibility to not be bothered if the dough rises more or less quickly than expected.

Once the bread is baked, let it cool on a rack for at least 20 minutes before cutting into it. Seriously. Don't cut into the bread when it's fresh from the oven. Okay, okay, but just once. You can enjoy the bread when it's warm that way, but you will ruin the interior of the bread that way.

And now you have not only sandwich bread From Scratch, but you have a house that is infused from end to end with the smell of baked bread. A more delightful fate cannot be imagined. Enjoy it, and revel in how easy it was, at least if you left yourself the flexibility to do it easily.