The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book_ A Guide to Whole-Grain Breadmaking - Laurel Robertson [113]
Form the dough into a ball and place it smooth side up in the bowl. Being sure that there is plenty of room for the dough to expand (even triple), cover, and keep in a very warm (90°F), draft-free place. After about an hour gently poke the center of the dough about ½ inch deep with your wet finger. If the hole doesn’t fill in at all or if the dough sighs, it is ready for the next step. Press flat, form into a smooth round, and let the dough rise once more as before. The second rising will take about half as much time as the first.
Divide the dough into two, and using a rolling pin, gently press out all the gas. Round the halves and let them rest, covered, until they relax before you shape them into loaves. Try to avoid using much dusting flour on the board. Place the shaped loaves in greased 8″ 4″ loaf pans, and set in a very warm place (90 to 95°F) to rise. Protect the loaves from drafts and provide some humidity if possible, either by putting the loaves in a puffed-up plastic bag with a spoonful of hot water in it, or by putting a pan of hot water near the loaves as they rise. Proof the loaves until the dough returns slowly from a gentle touch of your wet finger.
Bake in a preheated 350°F oven for about 45 minutes, or a little longer. Cool before slicing—this one is far too poufy to slice before it is cool.
Sea Biscuits
These are delicious crackers, with a flavor similar to commercial Rykrisp, only better. The recipe was developed by our good friend Alan Scott when he was a shipboard chef, but it’s tasty under any circumstances.
Sprout the wheat for 2 to 4 days but not so long that there is any green in the shoots. Grind fairly fine. Mix in the oil, salt, soda, seeds, and enough rye flour to make a stiff dough. Form into golf-ball-sized rounds, then roll out on a well-floured board as thin as possible, not thicker than ¼ inch. Bake on a dry griddle on low heat for about 5 minutes on each side, or in a medium-low oven, until very slightly brown.
½ cup wheat berries
1 tablespoon oil
½ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon caraway seeds
¾ cup rye flour, about
Potatoes in Bread & Other Topics
In its 6,000-year history, bread has been adulterated in unnumbered ways because good strong clean wheat flour is a treasure that is really quite rare. When potatoes came to Europe from the New World, canny bakers recognized in them great possibilities for stretching their dough to make more loaves. Incredibly, unlike the usual more dubious additives, a little potato actually made the bread better—lighter, sweeter, better keeping—and potatoes have been used that way ever since.
The only small caution here has to do with a fascinating and somewhat awful little organism called Rope (Bacillus mesentericus). “Ropy” bread was the bane of the old-time bakeries because it would appear without warning and make whole batches of bread useless. The loaves would come out of the oven looking beautiful, and no one would suspect a thing until one was sliced—and had nearly no insides! Just a gooey hole that smelled like an overripe cantaloupe. This has happened in our century, even, and to someone we know.
The villain here is a kind of mold that, although it meets its doom in the oven, produces spores that survive the baking heat. When the loaf begins to cool, the spores grow wildly, with the bread for food. They multiply rapidly inside the loaf—with the results we have described.
Rope contamination of wheat or flour is rare these days. (Our friend’s ropy bread was from bad flour—white flour, lest you think otherwise.) Potatoes, though, can harbor spores on the skin and especially around the eyes, and that is why we suggest that you peel them carefully and remove all questionable parts, then rinse them under running water before cooking to use in bread. An added safety in many of our recipes is the use of cultured milk, which makes the dough a little acid: molds don’t thrive in acid media. (In fact, the old bakery manuals say that