Diving back into the BBA Challenge, I started a biga on Monday night. This was the only one of the 3 pre-ferments in the BBA that I had not used yet. As this is an Italian style pre-ferment, I chose to make the Italian Bread.
Italian Bread is similar to a French Bread, but with a few extra ingredients. This dough is enriched with oil, sugar, and dry malt extract (which I happened to have due to my trip to the home brew supply store for beer ingredients last weekend).
As always, I kneaded by hand. I’m really starting to want to take a class on breadmaking. I feel like I’m always adding a bunch of extra flour to my dough to get to a tacky but not sticky dough. I also don’t think I’m always passing the “window pane” test. I do get a little window pane…but it also tears pretty easily as well. The dough was within the right temperature range when I left it to ferment. The other reason I’d like to take a class, is to work on my shaping. One of these loaves ended up pretty close to what it was supposed to look like, but the other i didn’t quite get my edge sealed so I had a little edge on one side of the loaf.
