Breadzilla
Today, I tried to make a bread from a recipe for an Italian Country Bread from a book titled "simply bread" by Wendy Sweetser, published by metro books.
The operative word here is "tried."
Even though something about the recipe didn't seem quite right to me, I naively followed it to the letter, then when it became obvious that something was drastically wrong, I had to deviate in a major way.
Here is the ingredients list:
Starter dough:
3 1/2 cups (1lbs) strong white bread flour
1 1/4 (8 oz) semolina flour
1 Tbsp quick rise yeast
5 1/2 cups warm water
Main Dough:
1 2/3 cups (8oz) strong white bread flour
1/2 cup plus 2 Tbsp olive oil
1 egg white
4 tsp salt.
When I started making it, the 5 1/2 cups of water seemed excessive. but i went ahead and followed the recipe anyway. I wound up adding so much additional flour that I wound up with an enormous batch of dough when I was done. It became a true breadzilla in the oven.
Did I screw up, or is the recipe faulty?
Anytime you have more water than flour you know something is not kosher. Doing a rough calculation you have around an 85% hydration dough which is very high for this style of bread. Also it seems like you have a big amount of yeast as well. Even though the olive oil technically does not count towards the hydration of the dough, that's a big amount as well. I wonder if the recipe had some typos in it.
For that amount of flour, I wouldn't use more than 1 teaspoon (1 tsp) of instant yeast. Using warm water should give you a three hour bulk rise with that amount of yeast, maybe a longer if the amount or malted barley is very very small.
Now that is a lot of Water, I wonder if the Author wanted 5 ½ cups of flour and 3 ½ cups of Water...
will give 68% hydration (consider that is without the egg or oil) the 8 oz semolina will absorb 8 oz of water which would bring the dough feel down to 58% hydration ((half of 44oz is 22 oz; 22 oz water - 8 oz = 14oz water; 32oz flour - 8oz= 24; (14/24) x100= 58%)) and that sounds doable. The salt content is around 2% so the flour amount sounds right.
My recommendation: Cut the total water amount in half, 2 3/4 c. water and add if needed after letting the flour mixture hydrate for 30 minutes. Write correction in big red letters next to the water in the recipe.