Headachy and bready

Headache all day that makes looking at screens difficult. But it has not
impaired my ability to bake bread, luckily, although I haven’t been able to
do anything else. (Yes, clients, I am behind! Again!)

So I baked the Overnight White Bread with 80% Biga that I prepped last
night.

After stress nightmares that included looking at the container that held
the biga and seeing weird stringy stuffin it, myrialux woke me up and
reported that it looked good and had indeed risen quite well. So I mixed
up the flour, water, yeast, an astounding amount of salt (22 grams for 3ish
pounds of dough!), and the biga.

It was wet, sticky, and salty, and I was skeptical. It proofed for 3 hours
and I did the periodic folding it asked for, and it was still wet, sticky,
and salty, and I was still skeptical. And then I did the final shaping,
adding way more flour than it called for because it was so wet and sticky.
However it wasn’t quite as salty at this point.

I let it do the final proof (proofing is bread snob talk for rising) and
put the Dutch oven into the oven as it preheated, because of course snobby
artisan bread is baked in a Dutch oven to replicate the conditions you get
in a professional oven.

And then there was a pause to get myrialux help me to clean the
smoke-producing charred stuff off the bottom of the very hot oven before it
set off the smoke alarms.

(Note: having a cheap Dutch oven from Walmart means that the handle can
actually tolerate 475F, unlike Le Crueset Dutch ovens!)

Anyway, I then took one of the two dough blobs, split it in two, and
wrapped and refrigerated one for pizza in the next few days, and froze the
other to see how well it tolerated freezing.

Finally the dough finished proofing and I caaaaarefully deposited it into
the blazing hot Dutch oven and baked it.

Result: very very good! Is it perfect? Nope, of course not. It’s my first
time using these techniques (folding instead of kneading, a well-hydrated
dough, Dutch oven baking, etc.) and I’m quite happy with what I did. The
holes in the crumb are a bit uneven, I think there’s some rivulets of
unincorporated flour in it from the final shaping, and the crumb’s a bit
damp despite a very nicely chewy crust and almost an hour in the oven. A
bit of research (i.e. Googling ‘troubleshooting bread’) led me to an
article on Serious Eats that informed me my issues are probably with
shaping the loaf, and I agree because I had the hardest time with that.

Carefully reading the extensive directions in the book also revealed that I
missed a final step after incorporating all the ingredients together that I
think might have given me more help with later steps, but even so it’s a
perfectly edible, tasty loaf.

I’ll happily bake from this book again.