The Food Pig

Bread
Experimenting with my standard bread recipe today. This is a rather quick and easy recipe for some really good French loaves. I ran several trials to get the recipe and timing down to make the actual preparation time as low as possible. Ingredients include bread flour, wheat gluten, diastatic malt, active dry yeast, salt, onion powder and water. I use a stand mixer with a dough hook to prepare the dough and it does the extra kneading that is usually necessary.

2 cups bread flour
2 tbsp active dry yeast
2 tbsp wheat gluten
2 tbsp diastatic malt powder
2 cups water at 115-120F

Blend all of the dry ingredients above in the mixer bowl, add the water and whisk until combined. Cover and let stand for 2 hours in a warm place. I usually put it in an unheated oven with the light on. After 2 hours, the mixture should be bubbly and have a pleasant smell of yeast with a hint of alcohol (from the fermentation).

4 cups bread flour
2 tbsp onion powder
2 tsp salt

Combine the remainder of the ingredients, add to the mixer bowl and start the mixer, not too fast to avoid dry flour flying out of the bowl. The dough should form a ball and pull away from the sides of the bowl. If it is sticking, add small amounts of bread flour in 1/2 tbsp increments. Total time should be about 10-12 minutes. Cover and allow to rise until doubled in size. If the yeast was active, this should take around 30-60 minutes.

Prepare two sheet trays with parchment paper and a light dusting of coarse semolina. Dissolve 1 tsp of corn starch of Remove the dough from the mixing bowl, punch down to remove the gas pockets and cut into 4 equal size pieces. Shape into