Baking with Betty: Trying Something New

 

In spite of it being only 68 degrees in the house, Betty has been bubbling like crazy and I haven't even had her heater turned on. 

Since she's been so active, I thought I'd try something new. I wanted to try baking her in a loaf pan instead of my Dutch oven so I ordered two with some parchment liners.

I usually make two small, round loaves with this particular recipe but instead I made one big, oblong one. 

While I was waiting around for Betty to do her thing with the bread dough, I also made a batch of Sourdough Apple Donut Cake with my jar of discard. Instead of three smallish loaves I should have made two bigger ones but other than that they were amazingly good. They taste just like apple cider donuts with a crunchy cinnamon sugar layer on top. 

Six hours later it was looking promising. After taking off the pan I used for a lid I was surprised to see such an extreme ear.

In spite of it not being put into a pre-heated Dutch oven there was a lot of oven spring. I even got blisters along the sides. I wasn't expecting those from this scaled down version.

I have to admit that those sourdough girlies on YouTube know their stuff. It is possible to skip all the pre-heating and lugging around of very hot, heavy pots. I'm not saying I'll never go back to the more conventional way but it's nice to know that there is a shortcut.