I am on a journey towards turning out that perfect loaf of whole wheat bread(and I'm going to blog about every loaf of course ;)), and to first figure out all the touchy feely aspects of baking bread I was advised to start with white bread :)! Felt a bit weird to me as I try a lot to minimize white flour/maida in my cooking and baking, and a packet of maida lasts for ages at my home, but considering that the store bought ones are nearly completely maida anyway, this didn't sound a bad idea at all.
My first attempt was using the famous James Beard recipe for white bread that I found online
here. Most recipes seem to be for 2 loaves, so instead of tampering with the amounts to adjust for one loaf, I decided to play it safe and follow the recipe. I then made a part of it, and refrigerated the rest for the next morning. The only tweak was using Olive Oil instead of butter of course ;). This is what it looked like:
I found that the first rising did not take as long as the recipe mentions, probably because of the warmer weather we have here. When I checked after little more than an hour, it was nicely fluffed and double in size already!
The loaf looks brilliant from the outside, but I found that the insides were a little underdone, especially in the centre. Still trying to figure this out, as I have a convection oven, and even using a lower temperature seems to brown the loaf on the outside very fast. On browsing I found that using foil to cover up the bread after it's half done will stop it from browning/burning on the outside, so got to try that next. Also need to see some videos to learn the correct kneading techniques I guess :).
The dish accompanying it for dinner was Fish Moily - a dish from Kerala that I learnt from my mom-in-law. It's made with seerfish, and has a nice sweet/spicy/tangy combination because of the coconut mik and tomato combination along with green chillies for spice.