RWC 50% WW Sandwich Loaf v1.0
I got a bee in my bonnet the other day about making a simple loaf of 50% whole wheat sandwich bread. Nothing special, just a good solid bread for toast, sandwiches and the like. One thing I wanted to do was to keep the level of effort fairly minimal (somewhere just above using the bread machine....) :) I read a bunch of different recipes, and this is what I came up with:
300g AP flour
300g Whole wheat flour
366g Water
30g Milk
1 Tbsp butter
1 Tbsp sugar
14g Salt
1.5g ADY
I mixed together the dry ingredients (including yeast), whipped the butter into the water/milk with a fork (got lots of little globules), then mixed the wet and dry together until everything was incorporated. This was at about 9pm, and I left it in the mixing bowl, covered overnight. At about 6am, I pulled the dough out of the bowl, and it was nice and soft, a bit puffy, and quite sticky. With a light dusting of flour and my scraper, I pre-shaped it, then let it rest for about 30 minutes. Then I did a final shaping, and dropped it (gently, of course) in a greased loaf pan. It took about 3.5 hours for the dough to rise over the level of the loaf pan, at which point, I cooked it in a 425 degree oven for about 35-40 minutes (temp was 200 when I removed it.) Let it cool, and sliced it the next day for a toast test. Pretty tasty stuff! Nice moist crumb, soft and tender, and very wheaty!
I'd like to get a little more loft to this one, so the next version might use a bit more flour, or a longer final rise. Possible flavor tweaks would be to use honey instead of sugar, and maybe oil instead of butter to see what impact that might have (I'm guessing not much, they are pretty small additions anyway.)
I consider this a success -- low effort, solid sandwich loaf, and look forward to tweaking this one a bit more. Maybe I'll even take more photos next time! ;)
Thanks for looking!
R