Six hundred batches

Last week saw the baking of my six hundredth batch of bread, with recent batches being made with two and a half pounds of white flour and near a pound of wholemeal flour. Plus small amounts of dried yeast, salt and rape seed oil. Plus a pint and a half or so of cold water. Even allowing for the loaves being smaller when I started out back in January 2011, that is still a lot of bread. I thought it right to make a record of the occasion.

So the snap above was posed at the end of the first knead, at around 07:30.

Being knocked back at the start of the second knead, at around 12:00.

Ready for the proving bin, at around 12:20. Loaf tins from an old-style household goods store in Tavistock, on the southern edge of Dartmoor. A town which is also responsible for a chunk of my holdings of classical vinyl, once the property of a big collector.

Just before bringing the lid down on the proving bin. A bin which has done good service in the two and a half years since it came into service at reference 1. A bulky object, which normally lives in the garage. Might grudge the space in the absence of this last.

That said, with the new viral flour from Ponders End, it has taken me a while to learn that too much second rise is a bad thing, apt to lead to bubbles, caves, volcanoes and - at worst - collapse. With timing complicated by the fact that the rise seems to accelerate as it goes on, so one needs to keep an eye on things for the last hour. The current idea is to put the bread in the (pre-heated) oven when the tins are full, with the dough rising about half an inch above the rims.

Fresh out of the oven, after 45 cooking, at around 15:45. Something under nine hours start to finish - rather a long time for an amateur to be tied down - unless, that is, one is retired.

Cut at 18:00, more or less cold. The suggestion of a stripe along the bottom being an artefact of clumsy cutting rather than incomplete rise.

Ready to go. When it is this fresh, taken more with cheddar than butter. That is to say Lincolnshire Poacher from Neal's Yard of reference 2. Butter better when the flavour has developed a bit overnight. Complicated stuff bread!

BH's part in the operation was to give the weights a wash and brush up, to remove all the accumulated bits of flour and dough. After which I learned that it used to be the custom for the two ounce weight to be brass, even when the set as a whole was grey painted steel. Both scale and weights probably from a charity shop somewhere. A bit to grand for Hook Road Arena.

PS: the road to 600 has been pretty steady, as shown in the pivot table above. Even if I failed to work out how to adjust the vertical axis so that it made better use of the space available. With the gentle curve up reflecting the growth in size of batch over of the period.

Reference 1: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/07/bread-proving-bin.html.

Reference 2: https://www.nealsyarddairy.co.uk/.