As you can most certainly tell by now, 11:00pm is my favourite time to be baking.
The house is quiet and I'm always effortlessly calm.
Tonight I chose to do a plain white bread, and went with Dan Leperd's milk loaf because he is simply quite brilliant and his recipes are among the few that I trust.
The technique is really interesting - usually the wet ingredients are added to the dry, but in his you whisk together milk, yeast and golden syrup, and then add the flour and salt. To make things even weirder, you knead in the fat after forming the dough. Then there's also the fact that you knead it FOUR times (leave for 10 minutes, knead for 10 seconds, repeat).
Clearly, it was worth it - the raw dough looked absolutely gorgeous, and the finished product was outstanding.
So, it seems that trust remains unsullied.
This bread is truly delicious, and isn't at all leaden or tough like I feared homemade bread would be. It has a lovely dark crust and a pillow-soft, fluffy inside.
The only instruction I didn't quite get the point of was to split the dough in two before placing in the tin. Why? It looked a bit weird, kind of like a seam. Frankenstein's (bread) monster:
Sorry about the fuzziness, it was obviously rather dark so the shutter was really slow. I absolutely refuse to use flash - I hate the way the light looks harsh and flat. I did try out a flash diffuser a few times, and although there was a difference, it was only a slight one.
So, simple it is not.
Was it worth spending 3 hours of my life on?
100%, definitely, absolutely yes!
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