Soft American-style white bread
I made this DEEElicious bread yesterday using the "Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day" book. The flavor is awesome and it's tender to boot! It has a lovely slightly chewy and moist crumb that's a pleasure to pull apart. The crust is slightly sweeter and the center is slightly yeasty-breadier in flavor. Both are very good and makes you want to pull it apart to enjoy separately. I made the bread for peanut butter sandwiches but it's so good, I'm eating it plain for dessert. In fact, it was hard not to eat the entire loaf for dinner!
Soft American-Style White Bread
adapted from "Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day" - go buy the book!
Normally people think of this book and baking method for making crusty crispy-crunchy loaves, but this one is soft and just as delicious.
Ingredients
- 2 packets yeast (4.5 tsp, aka 18g, active dry yeast)
- 7cups +3.5Tbsp (900g *) bleached white flour (supposed to use unbleached but bleached was all I had)
- more flour for dusting
- 100 ml (scant 1/2 cup) vegetable oil (original used 1/2 cup melted butter)
- 2 Tbsp light brown sugar (original used white sugar)
- 1.5 tsp table salt (original used 1 Tbsp Kosher salt)
- 3 cups + 3Tbsp water (original used 3 cups water - I had to use more due to yeast failure)
Directions
Mix everything in a LARGE bowl (bigger than 10 cup bowl - try a 5 quart bowl). Just use a sturdy large spoon and don't knead.
Let it sit covered but not airtight at room temperature for 2 hours or until it rises AND flattens again. It doesn't have to flatten all the way, just deflate enough until the top gets flat. It can stay in this state for up to 5 hours or so. (Mine actually was at room temp for about 7 hours because the first batch of yeast failed and I added more at the 2 hour mark.)
Put it in the refrigerator in a large covered BUT NOT AIRTIGHT container. It will continue to rise/make gas and you don't want it exploding. Use it over the next 14 days to make 3 loaves. Mine makes 1.22 lb loaves though the recipe says they will be 1.5 lb loaves.
To Bake:
1 hour and 40 minutes before baking, lightly grease a 9"x4"x3" loaf pan.
Liberally dust the top of the dough in the refrigerated container with more flour and use a serrated knife to cut off a "cantelope sized piece". I just measured this by weight. It doesn't matter if you need to add/subtract bits. It will be VERY sticky and wet so if you're used to regular bread dough, don't worry. You won't be able to hold it easily since it will ooze slowly out of your hand.
Form into a ball, stretching one surface into a thin skin and tucking all the messy bits on the bottom. Try to elongate it a bit into an oblong if you can. Plop it into the loaf pan. The shaping step is supposed to take 30-60 seconds but if it's your first few times, it will take longer. I won't tell. It took me 10 minutes to cut & shape. Shhhh. (I was also a bit OCD about cutting off exactly 1/3 of the dough. Obviously this is also not necessary.)
Let it sit for 1.5 hours. You may go do other things now (or you may peek at it every 15 minutes, your choice). It may or may not rise and both cases are OK.
After 1.5 hours, preheat the oven to 350 deg F. I didn't bother with the pizza stone in the oven.
When the oven is done preheating, dust the top liberally with more flour and slash the top of the loaf about 1/4" deep with a serrated knife. Put loaf in the oven and bake 40 minutes or until golden brown.
Cool completely before slicing or else it'll collapse into a mush when you try to cut it and you'll be sad.
(*) Edit 2015.01.19: How I arrived at 900g for 3 loaves
I was trying to find what weight equivalents I was using for this recipe, but don't recall if the first time I made it was after I switched to the official standard of 120g per cup. However, using handwritten notes from 2012.03.27, I discovered that at least in 2012, I had been using 600g flour for 2 loaves. That means 3 loaves should be 900g. Back calculating, 7 cups + 3.5 Tbsp = 7.22 cups ==> 125g/cup. Pretty close to the official number!
Even though the smell of it baking has probably gotten your stomach growling, I highly recommend that you try a slice plain first, no butter! You gotta see how good it is completely unadorned. Then go ahead and work the butter angle if you must. :-)