Country-Style White Bread

Today was an epic day of baking. In preparation for multi-genre reveal tomorrow, I have baked: two loaves of country-style white bread; a HUGE vanilla, sour cream coffee cake; two enormous Challah braids; and 16 whole wheat pitas. Whew!

While baking, I documented the baking of the country-style white loaves. When I first started baking bread, I would obsess over whether or not things were looking the way they should. Cookbooks without thorough descriptions or pictures would irk me to no end! Thus, I give you a "from goop to glory" pictorial walk-through of the making of two loaves of white bread:

This, as you might have guessed, is the goop. Prior to this stage, all the elements of the dough are combined in the order specified by the recipe. This particular recipe called for a total of 5-5 1/2 cups of unbleached, all-purpose flour. Since no wooden spoon or arm in the world is capable of thoroughly mixing in that much flour, you have to turn the dough out of the bowl onto a floured surface after about 3 1/2-4 cups of flour. What resembled dough in the bowl will look like a lump of underdone oatmeal on the counter. Remove any rings and get ready to become Swamp Thing! You need to add the remaining 2 or so cups of flour by tablespoon; though tedious, this ensures that you maintain full control over the dough and can monitor how well it's mixed as well as how dry it becomes. Sounds pretty good in theory until you dive your hands in and realize that you no longer have individual fingers to pick up the tablespoon measure with. This is where a helper comes in handy. Keep at the kneading and mashing until you end up with a smooth, elastic-y ball that looks like this:

Next, grease a large, deep mixing bowl thoroughly and plop your kneaded dough into the bowl. Turn it over once so that the dough gets a full coating of the grease. This will keep the surface pliable as the dough expands. Cover the dough with a clean dish cloth and allow it rise for 1-1/2 hours, until it's doubled in size, like so:

Once the dough has puffed, you get to punch it! As stress-relieving at this sounds, you have to actually be gentle. Tearing the dough at this stage can affect the way that the loaf will bake, so rather than slamming a fist into the bowl you have to press gently, allowing the dough to deflate. This particular recipe yields two loaves of bread, so once the dough has been deflated it is cut into two equal portions. At this point you can either transfer the dough to a loaf pan or you can shape the dough and allow it to bake free-form. This time I chose free-form. I shaped the two dough halves into log shapes, covered them with plastic-wrap to avoid the formation of a tough skin on the air-exposed side of the loaf, and allowed them to sit for about 40 minutes to an hour, until about double in size:

Once the second rise is complete, the loaves are brushed with an egg glaze. This gives them a nice crispy crust and a beautiful golden brown color. You don't want to let the glaze puddle around the base of the loaves, though, as it will cause the loaves to stick and pull away from their bottoms as they bake. (You can see in the picture below where I failed at this step while glazing the loaf on the left. Whoops!) Once the glaze has been brushed on, you have the option of sprinkling the loaves with poppy seeds, which I think looks delightful. Then, pop 'em in the oven:

Let the loaves sit undisturbed in the oven for about 40-45 minutes. Since I have a small oven, my loaves only took about 35 minutes. Bread is possibly the easiest food to check for doneness. All you have to do is tap on the crust with the tips of your fingers. If the crust does not give and the tap results in a hollow sound, the bread is done! Remove the loaves from the oven and immediately transfer to a cooling rack. Ideally, your end result will look something like this:

Tah-Dah! Enjoy :)