Another Bread Post

I seldom bake white bread.  While it has its pluses, overall I prefer some whole wheat flour.  Since I just baked a loaf of 100% whole wheat, however, I decided to go the other way and do a loaf of white.

Temps for the overnight rise were rather warm, probably about 82 or so, and rise it did: over about 8 hours, it bumped up against the plastic wrap covering the bowl.

This has happened before with all-white flour dough, and it has always been in the summer when it has done this--I have never seen anything this explosive with dough mix that includes any amount of whole wheat flour.

Ordinarily, a vigorous pre-baking rise seems to portend poor oven spring, and that may have actually happened in this case.  However, the volume of the dough mass that went into the baker was so large it didn't really matter.

What came out of the oven was pretty nice.

I haven't often (or maybe ever) used a ruler for scale, but this loaf has a bigger cross-section than anything I have ever baked with whole wheat (even with vital wheat gluten added).  That's just the way it usually goes.  For a semi-useful comparison, here's the 100% whole wheat loaf again from the last baking session:

Back to the white loaf:  the structure shows that the rise, while pretty dramatic in comparison, was well-controlled and uniform (unlike what I was getting last winter when I let the dough sit out overnight at 60 degrees then switched to the oven for a couple of hours at 100).

So it was a success.  Maybe it's easier to be successful with white flour, but I usually get at least decent results (if not serve-to-guests-good) with some blend of whole wheat, despite occasional spinouts.