Hi, I’m Amy Riolo and we’re making Italian wheat bread. We’ve just added our sponge to the rest of our dough and we’ve made this dough after kneading it. It’s been resting for 20 minutes and then it looks like this.
Now, we’re ready to shape it. And what we have to do is shape it, it's just we’ll form it into a ball and when we formed it into a ball, we can place it into our prepared baking sheet. You could also make two smaller ones but for this one we’re going to do one larger one. You can see how sticky that its sticking to my hand but that’s okay you want that consistency for this bread, so don’t be worried.
So now, what we have to do with this once its on the baking sheet is we’re going to cover it with an oiled plastic wrap and set it aside for about three hours until it triples in volume. When it triples in volume, it’s going to look like this, it's going to be a much rounder disk. We can pull our oil off, and then we’re going to make a cross with a sharp knife on top.
Now, a lot of people think that the cross has a reason for baking that it has a really fancy reason and its not. It actually has a traditional, cultural reason. People used to make markings in their bread, because they had communal ovens, so they would have to bring the breads to the oven to be baked all together. And in order to tell whose bread was whose. they would make a fancy marks on top. So that’s why bakers still do that today.
Because we’ve got this one ready to go, we can go ahead and bake it. Our oven is pre-heated to 400 and 25 degrees. And you want to make sure to bake this on the lowest rack possible. That’s going to give you a really nice color and a darker crust. That will bake for about 30 minutes and when it's finish baking, it's going to look like this. This is your Italian Whole Wheat Bread.
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