Black Knight White Bread

This was the bread that didn’t die. I tried, really hard, to kill it — mixing the yeast with salt before it was activated, not covering the bowl during the first rise, putting it on an ungreased cookie sheet before I put it in the oven, forgetting about it while it was baking.

But like the Black Knight from Monty Python, this bread kept fighting, even with the metaphorical blood pouring from its very real wounds. Mostly because Molly and Chloe, who have actually baked bread before, kept rescuing it. And it’s delicious, and somehow doesn’t look too much the worse for the wear.

The recipe below is more what I should have done than what I actually did.

At Chloe’s recommendation, (and based on a recipe from The Fresh Loaf) I started with poolish, a pre-fermented mixture of flour, water and yeast. To give the yeast time to activate, we mixed the poolish 24 hours before starting the actual dough.

Poolish

1 cup water
1 cup flour
1/4 teaspoon rapid-rise yeast

Mix the ingredients and leave in a covered bowl overnight. By the next day it should look terrible — kind of like rotten pudding with hemp seeds in it. (Not that there are actual seeds, but that’s what the bubbles look like.) That means you’re doing it right.

The following day, mix the dough:

Black Knight White Bread

poolish
1 1/2 teaspoons rapid-rise yeast
3 cups flour (we used half all-purpose white and half white whole-wheat)
about 1 cup warm water
1 1/2 teaspoons salt

Mix the yeast and the water together and let the yeast activate. You can tell it’s activated when it bubbles. (Rapid-rise yeast isn’t supposed to need water for activation, but the first time around I mixed all of the ingredients directly, and there was clearly something wrong. Chloe magically rescued me, adding more yeast that she activated with water. In any case, it can’t hurt to mix the water and yeast beforehand.)

Combine the yeast-water mixture with the rest of the ingredients, and stir until doughy. I mixed the dough that formed by hand for about five minutes to activate the gluten in the flour.

Cover dough and let rise for approximately two hours. Knead for five minutes a lightly floured surface. Shape into a ball.

At this point, I decided there was no way in hell I could stay awake for another two hours to wait for the second rise, so I stuck the dough in the refrigerator overnight. When I woke up the next morning, it had risen again. I punched the dough down and set it aside to return to room temperature.

When it was no longer cold, I divided the dough into two balls, and Molly helped me shape shaped the dough into long loaves. We scored the top with a sharp knife to get the pretty diagonals.

Let rise once more, for about 30 minutes, while you preheat the oven to 550 degrees. Paint the tops of the loaves with egg yolk. Before you put the bread in, turn the heat down to 450. Let bake for 20 minutes, or until the bread looks golden. (Like I said, I forgot about it for a while while it was in the oven, so that time is an approxmation).

The result was, miraculously, amazing. Crusty on the outside, light and silky on the inside. If the bread was any the worse for the wear, I’m excited to see how it comes out next time.