During the great (but brief) flour shortage of 2020, I ordered any flour that was available from King Arthur Flour's website. Some of the new flour types I purchased were fantastic - the Pizza Flour Blend in particular - but others, I've struggled with. The High-Gluten Flour falls into that category. The pizza dough I made with it was just ok, and King Arthur's No-Knead Everything Bread, which seems adapted to this flour in particular, also was just ok.
I initially thought the issue may be my continued use of a large Dutch oven to bake high-hydration no-knead doughs instead of a smaller bread pot which would allow the bread to rise more than spread. This problem plagued me with Jim Lahey's No-Knead Bread recipe. The fridge-rise, less-hydration Jeff Hertzberg approach and its variants generally produce must better loafs. However, I tried this flour with the King Arthur-version of Hertzberg's approach and also ended up with a slightly (but not that much) lower rise bread.
So the issue seems to be the flour or more likely, my unfamiliarity with it. In any case, this recipe, which I halved and used just sesame seeds instead of an everything spice blend, will probably not be a repeat.
While the bread dough was easy to prepare, as all no-kneads are, I really don't like handling gooey, non-fridge rise doughs like this.
These doughs are just far messier to shape and transfer to a baking pot.
The upside of this bread is that it tasted wonderful - yeasty, slightly crusty on the outside, and soft in the middle. It was gone within the day!
This did look like difficult dough to play with, but the end result does look yummy! I wish I could eat the pictures!!
Posted by: Cuddles | June 22, 2020 at 13:24