Replaces Sliced supermarket bread
The everyday sandwich loaf
A soft, open-crumbed white loaf built on an overnight poolish. Four ingredients, about half an hour of actual work, and the dough does the rest.
- Hands on
- 30 minutes
- Total time
- Overnight + 6 hours
- Makes
- 2 loaves
Supermarket bread is the loaf most people replace first, because the gap between the shop version and the home version is enormous and the ingredient list is flour, water, yeast and salt. The one extra step is a poolish: a wet flour-and-water starter you stir together the evening before. It takes two minutes and gives the bread a deeper flavour, a softer crumb and a crust that stays good for days. This makes about 1.6 kg of dough, enough for two tin loaves or one very large free-form loaf.
Ingredients
Poolish (the day before)
- strong white bread flour300 g
- water300 g
- dried yeast1 tsp
Dough
- all of the poolish
- strong white bread flour650 g
- water350 g
- dried yeast1 tsp
- fine salt (2% of the total flour)19 g
Method
- The day before, make the poolish. Stir the flour, water and yeast together in a bowl until there are no dry lumps; it will look like thick pancake batter. Cover and leave at room temperature for 12 to 16 hours. It is ready when the surface is covered in bubbles, it has domed up and it smells yeasty and slightly boozy.
- Mix with a stand mixer. Put the poolish, flour, water and yeast in the bowl, but hold back the salt. Mix with the dough hook on low for about 7 minutes. Add the salt, turn the mixer up to high and mix for 3 more minutes, until the dough is smooth, glossy and pulls away from the sides of the bowl.
- Or mix by hand. Put everything in a bowl, salt included from the start, and squeeze it together into a shaggy dough. Tip it out onto an unfloured worktop and slap and fold for about 10 minutes, until the dough is smooth, springy and no longer sticks to the counter. It will be very sticky for the first few minutes; that is normal, so don't add flour. Our article on slap and fold and stretch and fold shows exactly how.
- Bulk ferment. Put the dough in a clean bowl, cover, and leave it at room temperature until it has roughly doubled, about 3 hours. Give it a set of stretch and folds after 45 minutes and again after 1 hour 30 minutes, then leave it alone for the rest of the time.
- Shape. Tip the dough onto a lightly floured surface. For sandwich loaves, divide it in two, pat each half into a rectangle the width of your tin, roll it up tightly and set it seam-side down in a greased tin. For one large loaf, shape it into a tight round or oval instead.
- Final proof. Cover and leave for about 1 hour at room temperature, or put it in the fridge overnight. It is ready when you poke it with a floured finger and the dent springs back only slowly and doesn't fill in completely. If it springs straight back, give it more time.
- Heat the oven to 230°C, top and bottom heat, no fan. Put a large roasting tray of water on the bottom shelf while the oven heats so it is full of steam when the bread goes in. Give it a good 30 minutes. A fridge-proved loaf can go straight in from cold.
- Bake for 20 minutes with the steam. Then take out the water tray, turn the oven down to 180°C and keep baking until the crust is a deep, dark brown, usually another 25 to 35 minutes. Don't take it out when it is merely golden: this loaf is hard to overbake, and the colour is where the flavour is.
- Turn the loaves out onto a rack and let them cool completely before slicing. Bread keeps cooking as it cools, and cutting it warm gives you a gummy crumb.
One thing that helps. Watch the poolish, not the clock. In a warm kitchen it can peak and start to sink back before morning; if that keeps happening, make it later in the evening or use cold water. A poolish that has just started to collapse is still perfectly usable.