hello! my name is mollie. I am a newbie baker and I have only looked to find the perfect white bread and I have been pretty happy with it so far.
well I have three young kids so I made double the recipe, made three loaves of bread and froze two of those, and I froze the dough in three separate bags so I can bake them when I needed them.
I thawed one bag in the fridge and tried to proof in the oven (77 degrees F) and it wouldn't "rise" like it does when I bake it fresh dough. it was in there for two hours. it only rose about 50% in a 9x5 pyrex pan. i figured I have nothing to lose to I just started the oven and baked it. it was SO GOOD. better than the white bread that it originally made. my four year old is raving about this bread. question is... what happened? why was it still good bread and not a dense brick? it's a mistake I hope to make again.
There are a couple (okay, maybe more than a couple) of ways to improve the flavor of bread.
One is to prolong the fermentation time; also called retarding the dough. A slow ferment - like thawing in the fridge- - should kick up the flavor of a bread.
Another way to improve flavor is to add a preferment - a flour/water mix that has been previously fermented. There are a variety of preferments, including biga, poolish, and levain (sourdough). You can read about these in a good baking book, like Hamelman's Bread or Reinhart's The Bread Bakers' Apprentice or Forkish's Flour Water Salt Yeast. There is also plenty of information on TFL.
Often a baker would use both techniques (and whatever else is up her sleeve).
I sometimes make white bread for customers too. It's a 'milk' bread, made with milk instead of water, and butter & sugar. I find that it doesn't rise fast or much after it's been in the fridge overnight, and I suspect that might have something to do with the butter. The dough is very stiff, like pie pastry, when I take it out of the fridge to shape it. Makes very nice bread though!
aha interesting! The original recipe has a preferment, + the slow ferment during the thaw this time must have made the bread better than the original.