I will get to experimenting with other kinds of bread soon I hope, though I have difficulty escaping from making French bread, not necessarily because it is the most versatile bread (all the holes does not make ideal bread for sandwiches, french toast etc, and sometimes something with a soft crust is nice). However, French bread is the most fun to make, and this is a strong draw, as I definitely do not make bread just for the sake of having bread.
I find the challenge of making the same kind of bread every week is replicability. I am experimenting with little things every week, so I don't expect the final product to be the same, but I'm beginning to think that even if I did the exact same thing every week, the final bread would still have a different crumb each week, because there are so many variables.
This week, I experimented with autolyse in order to strengthen the gluten development of the dough. Autolyse is an overly fancy term that basically means when mixing the final dough, after adding the flour to the water and poolish, you let the flour sit in the water for a few minutes, and allow the flour to develop strands of gluten on its own. Like many things in baking bread, this seems a little like magic, and it does work. The gluten was noticeably stronger than just mixing in the flour and working it into a dough immediately. I would recommend trying this method, as it is no work, and fits into the process of making bread quite nicely; I am always doing other things while making bread, as the process takes hours, but only a few minutes a time actually doing anything.
I've found some more great videos of interesting bread ovens, which I'll post soon.
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