Cooking with Jonny69: baking bread.

[Jonny69]

It doesn’t raise it very much, in my experience. Dough hooks, Kenwood Chef stand mixer and Kitchenaid Artisan.

 

[Mrs Seabiscuit]

The recipe looks fine. You don’t need the sugar or olive oil and I’d probably add another half teaspoon of salt for taste, but the recipe doesn’t look like the cause.

Knead it for longer in the mixer. Doesn’t matter what the instructions say, 2 minutes definitely isn’t long enough and a longer knead is always beneficial. Do 7-8 minutes minimum, preferably 10.

First rise for an hour sounds fine. Depends how warm your kitchen is. The longer you leave it at this point, the better the loaf tastes and the more active the yeast gets.

You can re-knead it in the mixer, but it would be better to scrape the dough out at this point and shape it into a loaf. Then, depending how warm your kitchen is, you need to leave it to pop back up for 30 mins or so before baking. Oven needs to be 230°C ie HOT.

Baking in a tin will restrict the loaf popping up and will always result in a more dense loaf than open baking. I’d recommend baking on a pizza tin or something. It’s also a LOT easier to get a smaller loaf to pop up and be fluffy, so consider practicing with a 300g flour recipe. Same flour:water ratios as 500g:
300g flour
200g warm water
1tsp salt
1tsp dried yeast

My top tip to stop it sticking during baking: bake on non-stick greaseproof baking paper!

Thank you Jonny! This is reassuring! I will experiment with your suggestions! Thank you, I will report back.

 

[jpaul]

It doesn’t raise it very much, in my experience. Dough hooks, Kenwood Chef stand mixer and Kitchenaid Artisan.

If I had a probe thermometer I would now be putting that to the test ... or, equally performing the window-pane test that many of the online videos do.

 

[NVP]

Man, temps have really changed lately! Made the dough yesterday as usual to leave overnight to prove, in the morning I usually then shape for my loaf tin and leave until around 11am to start baking - this morning it was already over-proved(!) so shoved it straight in after shaping.

Might have to start overnighting in the fridge already!

It's risen ok enough, just not held its shape as nicely.

(Recipe: ~580g chakki flour, ~520g water, 140g starter, 13g salt, large ladle of olive oil, half a ladle of honey. Baked in a 3lb loaf tin)

 

[jpaul]

so is that flour your regular ingrediant ?

What is Atta and why its different from Western Wheat Flour – Kannamma Cooks

www.kannammacooks.com

suggests it's wholewheat, but that looks white, and says rising might be lower dued to milling strategy ..

but on the other hand looks like a cheapish flour I'd never considered.

 

[NVP]

Oh yeh, it's just good quality whole-wheat flour I always use for roti (indian flat bread) giving a nice, soft fluffy roti that's easy to digest. So use it for my sourdough too. I did flirt with some ancient grains at one point, but came back to this as waaay tastier.

Edit: read your link fully, I've not had bread turn out anywhere close to those pictures haha looks terrible! Mine are always really fluffy and delish I find the rise is more tied to good gluten development and accurate timings for proving, rather than flour type (experimented a lot in my early baking days). I did up my starter (levain) quantity from what initial recipes used to say, and have refined to the above quantities baking twice weekly with this bigger loaf-tin for over a year now.

(FYI I buy East End Premium Gold Chakki Atta 20kg)