Bread progress, loaves #1 and #2

[packbat]

A while ago, the blogger and writer Kitty Unpretty posted a number of recipes, including a plain bread recipe that involved no kneading.

First, we got out a scale. The recipe lists quantities as volumes, but we were given this scale specifically for baking and we wanna use it, and using it, we found our about-one-third recipe ended up containing 300 g of all purpose flour, 3 g of sea salt, 1.5 g of instant dry yeast, and 200 g of tap water. Those were the quantities for loaf #1, which sat on the counter for a long time with the lid cracked, went into the fridge overnight because it was late and we didn't want to deal, then came out of the fridge and into the cast iron and into the oven the next day. That oven stint was technically 31 minutes, but we'd opened the oven at 30 minutes so I don't know that that last minute did much. The bread was slightly undercooked - bit gooey-adjacent in the middle.

Loaf #2 was meant to be the same with twice 50% more salt, but forty minutes in, we realized that it didn't look the same because we'd put in 300 g of water instead of 200 g. Hence an extra 150 g of flour and ... 0.7 g is not half of 4.5 g, Packbats, what did ... okay, fine. It ended up with not much more salt, I guess we just discovered looking at our notes; said notes add up to 449.8 g flour, 5.2 g salt, 2.1 g yeast (accidentally added a little more than we meant), and 301.2 g water. This one we shaped much sooner - I think probably when we were supposed to, as opposed to way late - and then baked for 35 minutes instead of 30. It came out good - the crumb was intact all the way through and the bread was tastier.

Still plain, though. We're inclined to blame the flour for being incredibly cheap.

Also, taking pictures was really helpful. Our visual memory is not sufficient to be able to judge whether a lumpy mess of flour has risen.

(If y'all follow us on the fediverse, y'all will have seen the thread for loaf #1 (including pictures), the thread for loaf #2 (ditto), and the posts we made about being excited. But we'll link them.)