A square Blonde

Once again, I'm experimenting with baking high hydration sourdoughs in loaf pans. This time I did the Country Blonde from FWSY. I did it mostly to make customers happy (some of whom, for some reason, find it difficult to cope with slicing a boule), but I also wanted to make it easier for me! It's not bad shaping and then transferring a very wet dough when you're doing one loaf at a time, but when I'm trying to cope with a large puddle of dough for 8 loaves, it's just too much trouble!

And this was a large puddle of dough. Tipping it out from Max's big mixing bowl onto the counter / work bench, it spread to the point where I almost had no more room to scale and shape the individual 'blobs'. It was also annoyingly sticky so I had to flour everything just to be able to cope. I loosely folded and rolled each piece, then plopped it into greased bread tins. After about 3.5 hours I managed to score the loaves (though still wet, soft and sticky) and put them in the oven (450F for a total of 45 minutes, with a spritz from a spray bottle at the start).

They actually turned out quite lovely. I kept one loaf for us and just had a piece with butter. The crust is definitely a lean bread crust - chewy and thicker than an enriched sandwich bread would be, and the crumb is really, really nice. Very pleasant flavour with a slight sour tang to it. I like this! :)

I had to flour the tops just so I could score them.

Nice burst and blistering; good colour.

Beautiful crumb, texture and aroma. This loaf is a little small - I kept this one for us because it scaled about 30 grams less than my normal market breads (due to the loss from all the wet dough that stuck to my hands and everything else!)