Making Bread - Week 3

This week - I tried two new recipes.

1. White Dough with the addition of a ferment
2. Olive Oil Dough with Olives

The book says that if you keep back a 7-ounce piece of dough when you make your first batch of bread, you can leave that piece in the refrigerator, while "refreshing" it once a week to develop flavor. Sort of like making a starter for sourdough, is what I'm thinking.

Last week - I kept back 200 grams of dough (almost 7 ounces). It was placed per instructions in a tightly covered bowl in the refrigerator for 2 days. On Monday evening (I forgot on Sunday night) - I pulled out the dough and added double it's weight of flour and of water (as per Bertinet's instructions) and mixed everything together until I had a firm dough...and back into the fridge it went.

I made a total of three different loaves - plain white bread, "sourdough" or white bread with ferment, and olive oil bread with olives:

Dry ingredients for the sourdough. The ferment is in the bowl on the right.

Recipe for Olive Oil Dough
18 ounces Bread Flour
2 tbsp Coarse Semolina (which I omitted - none available)
1/2 ounce (15g) Fresh Yeast or 1/4 oz envelope of dry active yeast (1 1/2 tsp)
1/3 ounce Salt (about 2 tsp fine-grain)
2 ounces Good Quality Extra Virgin Olive Oil
11 1/2 ounces Water

Dry ingredients for the Olive Oil Dough - hand pitted olives in the bowl on the right.

Follow the same method of combining the ingredients and make a ball of dough. Here's a picture of all three balls of dough lined up on the counter, including the new ferment (after mixing the ferment thoroughly into the new white bread dough, I again separated out 200 grams for next week's ferment).

White Bread

White Bread with Ferment

Olive Oil Bread with Olives
And the finished products - Plain White Bread

Sourdough (White Bread with Ferment)

Finished Olive Oil Bread with Olives