Really White Bread

 I wanted to try King Arthur's No-Knead sourdough bread in my bread machine. There will be some modifications. The ingredients are exactly the same:

• 1 cup (227g) ripe (fed) sourdough starter
• 1 3/4 cups (397g) lukewarm water
• 5 cups (602g) King Arthur Unbleached Bread Flour 
• 1 tablespoon (18g) salt

There is an optional ingredient of "diastatic malt powder". I don't even know what that is. I left it out, both in this batch and my previous batch using the manual method.

Naturally, my machine cannot do the lift-and-fold technique, and it can't automatically put the dough in the fridge. I was in the mood to experiment, though.

My bread machine has user-programmable bread-making courses. I'd never tried them, before. I've been satisfied with the built-in white bread and whole wheat cycles. Now is the time to try them out. The by-hand method has a mixing step, followed by three one-hour fold-and-rise steps. I adapted those to my bread machine as follows:

Step 1: Knead for 5 minutes (the minimum time)

Step 2: Rise 1 hour, includes a punch-down operation that is going to take the place of the folding-by-hand step.

Step 3: Repeat the punch and rise for an hour.

Step 4: Punch down and rise for two hours.

The manual method would have folded the dough and let it rise for an hour, followed by refrigerating it for 8-48 hours. I could have taken the baking pan out of the bread maker at this point and put it in the fridge, but I wanted to try a one-and-done approach.

The next step in the manual method involved taking the dough out of the fridge, shaping it, and letting it rest and rise for 2-1/2 to 3 hours. I could have extended step 4 for a few more hours if I wanted to, but didn't.

For baking, I really need to deviate from the recipe. The recipe has me warming the oven to 500º F, then lowering the temperature to 450ºF for baking. My bread machine does not have a programmable baking temperature. It bakes at "about 248ºF to 302ºF." That's quite a difference. The baking time is programmable, though. I decided to try 1 hour with the intention of checking the internal temperature of the loaf at that point, and baking longer if necessary.

OK, on to the results:

After the first mixing cycle, my dough looks like this:

One hour later after the punch down, it looks like this:

After the second rise and punch down, it looks like this:

I didn't get a photo after the third rise, but once it started baking it had filled the pan, as viewed through the window of the bread machine. Again, no photo.

After baking, I had this really white loaf.

I was afraid that it wasn't done, but its internal temperature had reached 200ºF. That was the goal. It yielded a very tall loaf, and let me reiterate--really white.

It didn't tastes as San-Francisco sour as the hand-made loaf. I think that comes from the extra fermentation time in the refrigerator step and the long rest time after taking it out of the fridge. It was not as dense, either. It is rather light and airy. It still tasted good, though. It will make good sandwiches.

It appears that the San-Francisco flavor that I have been striving for comes from the extended fermentation. I think my next experiment will be to try to get my rye recipe to have a more sour flavor. My intention is to use the settings from the built-in whole-wheat cycle, but significantly extend the last rise before baking.