NATURALLY LEAVENED KHORASAN SANDWICH BREAD

Steps:

• See the photo gallery and video below the recipe for target dough consistency and expansion.
• Starter Build
• The night before or early in the morning, build your 150g sourdough starter. For a night-before feed, use 20g sourdough starter with 65g water and 65g flour. For an early morning feed, use 50g starter with 50g water and 50g flour. Allow the starter to ripen until it is at least double in size.
• Mixing and Bulk Fermentation
• Scald the milk by warming it to 180°F. You may want to start with 400g milk because of evaporation.
• Add the honey, oil, and salt to the hot milk and let the mixture cool down to less than 115°F.
• Combine the flour, ripe sourdough starter, and liquid mixture in a large bowl. Mix thoroughly and cover.
• After a 20-30 minute rest, stretch and fold the dough with damp fingertips (see video below). Cover, let the dough rest another 20-30 minutes, and repeat the stretching and folding. Do the rest, and stretching and folding a third time.
• Let the dough bulk ferment until it has almost doubled in size. At warm ambient temps (high 70s) and the dough already warm from the milk, this took about 5 hours. Colder dough will need more time.
• Shaping and Final Proof
• Flour your work surface and scrape your dough out of the bowl.
• Shape the dough by stretching it into a rectangle, roll that up into a tube, flatten the tube a bit, and re-roll the dough into a tube again, making sure it is not quite as long as your pan.
• Place the dough in a lightly oiled loaf pan with the seam side down. I use a medium USA Pan, which is 9x5x2.75 inches.
• Cover and let the dough rise again for 1-3 hours at room temperature. My dough proofed for about 2 hours. The dough is ready to bake when it has doubled in size or its highest part crests over the lip of the pan. You can also refrigerate the dough overnight but first let it rise almost completely at room temperature, or plan for it to expand more the next morning at room temperature.
• Baking
• Put one of your oven racks on the second-from-the-bottom position and preheat your oven to 375F for about 15 minutes.
• Brush the top of the dough with milk and place it in the oven.
• Bake for 50-60 minutes, turning the pan halfway if the bread is browning unevenly. To firm up the bottom and sides of the loaf, take the bread out of the pan for the last 5-10 minutes of the bake.
• When baking is complete, the bread should have an internal temperature of about 200F.
• Brush the still-warm crust with butter or oil to keep it soft.
• Ideally, the bread should cool for about 2 hours before slicing.