Soaked Wheat Bread in Pictures part 2

By Cara, on June 24th, 2009

This is the second part of our 3-part series in pictures on making Soaked/Fermented wheat bread. (for part one click here) (Part 3 click here)
Our left-to-soak overnight dough from yesterday.
I pour 2/3 in my Kitchenaid mixer. If you don’t have a mixer, you can just leave it in the bowl that it soaked in.
I pour the other 1/3 in another smaller bowl to keep in my fridge for later this week so it’s available if I want to make soaked wheat muffins or pancakes. Apparently I didn’t quite mix it well enough, there’s still some dry flour at the bottom. I mixed it in again, and it’s going to the fridge until I need it anyway, so this flour will have time to ferment as well.
Covered with plastic wrap and ready for the fridge.

For the actual bread, I have yeast, honey, salt, and butter. These are all from Costco, ideally I’d buy my honey and salt from the health food store. Local raw honey, and moist ‘grey’ sea salt are better choices than pasteurized honey and more refined sea salt. We use organic butter when we have the money. This is one of those months…
I melt the butter on the stove. If it was soft from sitting on the counter, it could be added as is. This is straight from the fridge and needs to be softened to work into the dough. We don’t use microwaves in this home, we got rid of ours 2 years ago. I’m not convinced they’re safe, I know nothing has been proven one way or another, but I’d rather just go ahead and not use them. Just in case.
And add to the dough in the kitchenaid:
1/4 cup honey
1 scant teaspoon yeast (one packet is fine too, if you have a packet. A packet is 2-1/4 teaspoons I think)
1 teaspoon sea salt.

And mix with the dough hook.

While the dough hook is still going around, pour in the melted butter.
I wiped out the remaining butter from the sauce pan and used it to grease the loaf pans. We try to avoid teflon (non stick) and aluminum cookwear. Eventually I’d love to have cast iron or stonewear loaf pans.
Fill to about 1 inch from the top
Cover and allow to rise until even with the top of the pan, at least an hour. How fast this goes will depend on the temperature and humidity in your house that day, and the amount/brand of yeast you use.