Make ahead Bread

After all that Chinese culture and philosophy, I turned to some home comforts. What is cozier than warm bread straight from the oven, some tea and a nice book?

I've recently started trying to master making bread. While I can make quite a good loaf of plain bread, I wanted to increase my repertoire and I jumped on this book when I saw it on NetGalleys (who provided my review copy). Making ahead seemed like the perfect solution: prepare the dough and then bake it when I want to (ie, when the last slice of the previous food was eaten).

Now, I confess I have never had much luck with sour dough. My starter tended to be a finisher, the dough tended to mold instead of rising, etc. I found the introduction and the first chapters of this book, describing how to grow the yeast, clear and direct. No flowery language but plenty of floury descriptions (sorry, I will restrain any further puns). The recipes are interesting and varied. At the moment, my starter is growing nicely on all the water and flour. It should be ready to be used by the weekend and I can hardly wait.

However, I am not thoroughly pleased with this book. "Making ahead" doesn't mean preparing the dough when I have time and baking it when I have need. It means that most recipes require two or three days of advanced planning, allowing the dough to rest overnight, etc. While the total work time required isn't terrible, I found it hard to fit into my real life. Thinking "I will need bread two days from now so let's get started" isn't very practical. My life tends to be more: "Hmmm, running out of bread for dinner, let me bake another loaf". So I love the yeast heavy, two hours raising time recipes (King Arthur's Blitz Bread is great!).

If you want to do sour dough, however, get this book first!