Vitality

For a while now I've been baking bread with AP flour. This has worked out relatively well, but the recipe I'm using really toes the line of hydration and enrichment, which means that it demands a lot of the flour, and the natural variation thereof can sometimes come up a bit short in the structure department.

Back in the day I used to bake bread with bread flour, which is absolute easy-mode. I keep my pantry stocked with AP now, though, because I bake a lot of other things like the crusts for my pot pies or my chocco chip cookies, which very much do not benefit from an excess of gluten in the flour. Like, to be honest, they'd probably be fine since the fat (and sugar, in the case of the cookies) would likely tenderize things sufficiently for the gluten to never stand a chance, but all purpose is supposed to be all purpose.

The last batch of bread turned out particularly cakey and crumbly, so I decided it was time to make a change. Not by buying bread flour (because honestly, owning two different types of flour is getting a little too deep into the baking hobby than I really want to allow myself to get), but rather by buying some wheat gluten.

Sorry, my bad, it's ✨vital✨ wheat gluten. You know, as opposed to the usual optional, inessential wheat gluten.

Just look at how vital this is.

Anyway, I'm using 510g of AP flour total so I'm trying 15g of gluten to see what that does. By my calculation it should land things at almost 15% gluten. Depending how things go I might back it down to 10g, which would yield around 14% total.

There's already 30g of flour in the yudane, so 480 goes into the bowl.

And then whisking it together dry is rather important so that you don't accidentally make a wad of seitan in the middle of your loaf of bread.

My usual gauge for how well the bread will come together is seeing if it sticks to the spatula or pulls away cleanly, and we're looking good on that front.

And it kneaded up very well, with a good amount of springiness.

The first rise looks promising, with no slumping around the edges.

And the second rise shows promising structure too.

Out of the oven I got a good amount of spring that didn't collapse during baking.

And no tearing across the top, just a little bit around the edges which is quite normal.

As per usual this is just the first bake. One loaf goes in the freezer and the other loaf stays on the counter until Sunday evening when it'll get the second bake to brown it up and reset the starches. So far, I'm pretty confident in these loaves.