One Way To Make a Loaf of Bread

There's been a lot of discussion on other blogs about the various stages of making a loaf of bread and how people go about it.  And I thought, why not put together a pictorial record of what I do.  Now you will probably think that as a photographer, I'd make a good baker (or vice versa) and some of the shots do have a strange colour cast about them.  However, in my defence, I was trying to avoid getting dough and other undesirable substances into the working parts of the camera and some buttons got pressed and knobs twiddled for which I have little idea of the purpose.

Anyway, enough of the excuses.

The recipe was the bog standard Pane Francesa from SourDom's beginners blog.  Unfortunately, I didn't get a pic of the nicely active starter so the series starts from the freshly mixed dough followed by post-autolyse and cutting in of salt.  Then follows the series of stretch and fold that were done at one hour intervals.

If you look carefully at the bottom right photo you can see an air bubble trapped between the folds about an eigth of the way from the left hand end.  This indicates that dough is already gaining strength and can form quite thin membranes when stretched.

I think you can see what I mean about the strange colour casts.  You also get the impression of the greater dough strength in the final image.  In the bottom left photo, the dough was actively resisting stretching and trying to spring back.

In this sequence, we go from pre-shaping and shaping, through proving (at about one hour intervals) to turning out, scoring and into the oven.  If you look carefully at the creases in the tea-towel and the edges of the basket, you can see the extension and rise of the loaf during proving.

Here we see the progressive rise and browning of the loaf (at about five minute intervals) leading to the final result.

Well, that's about it.  As I said, it is only one way of many to get there and if another way suits you then that's OK by me.

Hope you find it useful and instructive.

Keep on bakin'

Farinam