Wow, that actually worked

Last year, I found Breaking Bread by Martin Philip a frustrating book. As I discuss at the link, when I followed Philip’s advice on keeping the dough at a precise temperature the dough rose much more than usual. But as my other bread books don’t specify a dough temperature, that didn’t seem to do me much good. Even so, I’ve had the urge to try and see if I could get the same results with other recipes. So last weekend, I gave it a shot.

Reading on the subject online indicated most bread doughs need a temperature between 75 and 78. Picking a whole-wheat recipe, I somewhat arbitrarily set the target temperature at 75 (75 to 78 is not a big difference but apparently it can make a big difference in the results). With air temperature at 66 and flour at 68 that meant the water temperature should be 91 degrees to get 75 degrees in the dough (I used my kitchen thermometer to figure all this out).

I actually miscalculated and made the temperature higher, but the bread still came out much larger than usual with my baking. I was able to use them for the sandwiches I made that evening — usually the slices are a little too small to be satisfactory.