Recents Failures and Success At Last With Bread-Baking

I've been baking bread from scratch for 35 years. You'd think I'd know a thing or two about making good bread dough. Apparently, that's not the case.

I don't have any photos of the failed bread batches, but I'll tell you briefly what's been happening with my dough. For the last few batches of bread, my dough has been sticky, requiring extra flour, and has failed to rise completely, showing signs of falling back before a full rise. The resulting loaves baked up pale, flattish, and chewy (according to my husband). I had run out of my white flour at about the same time my bread took a downward turn, one month ago. 

Last week's bread was no different, and I noticed I had to add quite a lot of extra flour to achieve a dough that I could form into loaves without sticking too much to the counter or my hands. I thought I was beginning to lose my mind. The recipe I had always followed was suddenly not working. I was thinking I'd lost count of the cups of flour or mis-measured the water, or didn't add enough sugar (effecting browning), or, or, or. . .

Today I started another batch of 3 loaves of part whole wheat, part white bread (per the recipe). I paid much more attention to amounts and counted precisely. I was definitely needing to add lots more flour. I had very carefully measured the water, so my thought was the flour was holding moisture grabbed from the air while in storage in the paper sack. So I added lots more flour, extra sugar, salt, and yeast. Since it was the white flour I thought may be causing trouble, I went heavy on the whole wheat flour in my additional amounts. I added the sugar, salt and yeast in proportion to the extra flour amount, based on the original recipe. A recipe that calls for 8 cups of flour ended up using more like 10 1/2 cups. So for the last month, I've been baking bread with flour out of proportion to the salt, sugar, and yeast, and loaves with more white flour than whole wheat.

The final result for these 3 new loaves can be seen in the photo above. These are well-developed, fully-risen, browned loaves. I'll have to wait for my husband to give me the critique on texture and taste tomorrow, when he cuts into the first loaf.

Anyway, this frustration and experience prompted me to look into causes of sticky dough and poor rise with bread dough. Not only has moisture content of the flour likely been an issue, but the protein content of the white flour used may have played a part. Good bread dough relies on flour with a protein content of around 12.5 to 13+% protein. 

My white flour is all-purpose. The white flour I ran out of a month ago was a bread flour of much higher protein content. With my wacky diet, I'm not using much of our all-purpose flour, and we now have a surplus. I thought I'd use some of it in the bread. In years' past, I've made successful loaves of bread with half all-purpose, half-whole wheat bread. So I thought this would be okay. Only, I had used a different, more expensive brand of all-purpose flour than what I currently have on hand. And with recent loaves, my family had expressed interest in less whole wheat, more white flour bread. 

After doing a bit of math, I determined that my current all-purpose flour is about 10% protein. So, what I was doing was trying to make good bread with an average of about 11% protein content flour, between the lesser whole wheat and more all-purpose. The combination of added moisture drawn into my flour and a lower than ideal protein in the flour just sort of doomed my loaves.

Going forward, because I still have a surplus of all-purpose flour to use up. I'll have to reduce the water I add to the dough and use a 67% whole wheat, 33% all-purpose flour ratio for my bread. I hope that next week's bread doesn't throw me any more curveballs.

I'm fortunate that my family isn't terribly picky about my cooking. Even though the previous loaves of bread were dense, flat, pale, and chewy, they still ate it all. I'm very grateful for that, and the fact they don't complain about my cooking and baking failures.

You know what's really great about having a small success like this batch of bread? One single small success seems to blur the memory of about 30 small failures. Life feels less frustrating, and I am encouraged to do more.

Wishing you all a wonderful Thursday!