Folded Cheese Sourdough Bread (with just a touch of garlic)

First of all, let me tell you, fellow cheese freaks – you need to make this bread.

You need to make it because it turns out gorgeous, because it takes so very little effort, and because it tastes so incredibly cheesy, it borders on being hard to describe.  I’ll try though!  Have you ever bought that pretty loaf of “cheese bread” in the bakery, and then were disappointed when only the cheese-sprinkled crust tasted of cheese at all?  I know I have.  And this, in all its oozy cheesiness, this tastes like – and thus is! – the remedy for all your cheese bread disappointments.  This bread is moist, and has a beautifully open crumb with some shiny set-melted-cheese slicks in it, and is smells rich and wonderful and tastes as cheesy as I could have wished it to.

The sourdough base with a bit of wholemeal rye mixed in adds both a good sour edge and a wholesome earthiness to the flavor, and the chewy, glossy-pored texture is satisfying in the sense of you not actually needing to eat half the loaf to sate the cheese craving (hey, that’s a great way to deal with desire to snack on cheesy snacks otherwise!).  And to make it more of all the good things I love, I tossed in just a touch of garlic, too!  Now, do you feel the need to make it?  I sincerely do hope so!

The making, and specifically the putting-together method of this bread was inspired by something I had seen on the net somewhere, and, to my utter dismay and frustration, have failed to bookmark – which subsequently ended up with me being unable to find where I had seen the recipe and photos that prompted the making of this.  I looked and looked and found tons of different cheese bread recipes, but not the one I had wanted.  So, the credit for the idea goes to you, unknown blogger – and if someone recognizes the idea from someplace else, please do let me know so that I can credit the blogger for his or her idea.

The dough for this bread is a sourdough with about 1/4 wholemeal rye to 3/4 white bread (high-protein) flour, prepared by the no-knead method (see detailed instructions here).  Which is, in short – I mix the ingredients, cover the bowl with plastic wrap, leave overnight at room temperature (fairly warm, Swedish room temperature – I suspect it is 19-22C in my kitchen at night), then shred my cheese and proceed to the very easy prep and proof.  And then I transfer the whole thing on a piece of baking parchment into a preheated Dutch Oven and bake it.  But, first things first!

Ingredients:  (makes one loaf)

• ~50g live sourdough starter (I use 100% hydration) fed with some rye and some wheat flour in the past 48 hours.
• 120g wholemeal rye flour
• 360g white bread flour
• 2 teaspoons salt
• 2 teaspoons garlic granules or powder (this is entirely optional but I recommend it.  If you like garlic, I heartily recommend it.  If you worry about it, no it does not give it a heavy garlic scent at all – more like a gentle hint of it in the finished product.  If you still worry, replace this with a favorite seasoning of your choice.)
• 350ml cold tap water

• ~2.5dl (1 cup) coarsely shredded cheese of your choice (I used a mix of aged cheeses but this is really up to what floats your cheese boat).

Method:

• Mix all dry ingredients other than cheese and whisk to combine.  Mix water and sourdough starter in another bowl and whisk to combine.
• Mix the liquid into the flour mixture with a wooden spoon until all flour is more or less incorporated – the dough will be shaggy and somewhat sticky, and grey in color (rye flour tends to do that, don’t worry, it’ll bake up beautiful!).
• Cover the bowl with plastic wrap (clingfilm) and leave overnight in your kitchen.

• The next day, flour a board thoroughly and scrape the soft dough out on it.  Flour your hands as well and gently stretch it out using your hands into a rough rectangle.  The dough should be very relaxed and not resist at this point, so it should be fairly easy.

• Take your shredded cheese and sprinkle it all over the rectangle, as evenly as you want to bother with.  Just, you know, avoid dumping it all in a sticky clump onto the middle of the dough, and it’ll be fine.

• Roll the rectangle along the short edge to make a short stubby roll.  (Yes, I’ve rotated it in this photo after rolling!)  Cut the roll into three pieces and place them on a piece of baking parchment cut sides down to make a lumpy loaf.

• Flour a piece of cling film and cover the loaf with it (floured-side down) and then with a kitchen towel, and leave to proof for 1-1.5 hours (this may take longer if your kitchen is not very warm and depending on how lively your starter is), until it is somewhat puffed up.  Because of its shape, the loaf won’t quite double in volume, but the rise will be visible.
• While the bread is proofing, preheat your oven to 220C with the Dutch oven inside.
• Once bread is ready to bake, remove Dutch oven from the oven, open lid, (be careful, it will be bloody searing hot!), and carefully place the bread into the Dutch oven holding it by the baking parchment edges.  If you drop it a few centimeters, it will do it no harm.
• Cover Dutch oven, and bake for 20 min at 220C covered.  After the 20 minutes, remove lid and lower temperature to 190C and bake uncovered for another 20-25 minutes until the top is properly browned.
• Remove (carefully!) from Dutch oven – I usually stand it on a sturdy foot stool covered with a terry towel I do not mind singing for this – and cool on the rack for 2 hours or until cooled completely before cutting.
• Once cooled and cut, wrap the cut end in aluminium foil.  The bread will keep for a few days without drying out – if it lasts long enough to be around.  I cannot say with any certainty that it would last for longer than 3 days because after that it was just gone.

Rejoyce in your cheese satisfaction!  This is one of the best ever breads to have to vegetable soup in my opinion – the earthy flavor, the substantial texture and the glorious flavor of cheese works great without any need to butter the slices – but you do as you wish, for that is between you and your cheese addiction.  Because *cough* it’s not like I have sliced thick slices of it just to have alongside a cup of tea or anything…

In hindsight, I may try to make an even fatter roll and only slice it in half to see how that works to make a shorter and thicker loaf, but that is more a matter of curiosity than a necessary instruction, and it may well not turn out any better than this in the end.  And the slices were still a good size, especially if slicing slightly on the diagonal as I did.

Submitted to Yeastspotting.

Two-Fifths Sourdough Rye, and Some Baking Myths

This week, winter has finally and properly come to Stockholm.

We have -15C in daytime, sparkling white snow everywhere – it only really sparkles when the temperature outside is way below 0C – and the city is bright and beautiful and inviting to wander out and around in, now that there is no more horrible wet and dark November muck that lasted entirely too long this year – about two months too long if you ask me.

This sort of weather calls for comfort food, but not the heavy rainy-day fare, no – this calls for satisfying textures and earthy flavors; and the fact that there is NO way to overheat the apartment (all it takes is opening the kitchen vent and the problem is solved!), it is also a fantastic excuse to indulge in baking.

Rye bread is both, healthful and enormously satisfying to eat, and I happen to adore the flavor of it – nothing, nothing beats real and heavily buttered rye bread for things like pickled herring, Skagen seafood salad, charcuterie or smoked salmon.  Unfortunately, good sourdough rye is not that easy to find in even an average Swedish supermarket (it’s easy to find average quality there, heh!), and I can imagine that in most English-speaking countries it is a specialty item, and many people consider wholemeal rye flour difficult to bake with.

I know, I have been there myself when I tried to make the 100% wholemeal Finnish rye.  It turns out great, but it is a pain in the head dough to work with, really.  Now, that one is a traditional recipe so not up to me to change (I may well come up with a better way to make a high-percentage rye bread later), but this specific recipe I came up with on my own the other day.  And, guess what?  It is easy to make.  Really really easy.

Two things which gave rise to this recipe are my incessant reading on the subject of food, and my recent experiments (the failed and the successful) with no-knead bread.  I wanted rye bread.  I have read that rye flour works far better after a long sourdough fermentation, and I have seen how well and easily gluten develops in long, sourdough no-knead method fermentation.  The difficulties with bread that has a large part of rye are normally:  1. that it does not rise very well because rye gets in the way of gluten development, so you get a brick or a doorstop; and 2. that the dough is awful to work with and even look at – it is unattractively grey, gloopy and it is sticky above and beyond all reason, to the point of resembling actual carpenter glue.  So the problem is that you really don’t want to knead rye bread – and you have to knead to get the gluten to develop… oh wait – the no-knead method… Eureka!  And so this recipe came to be.

As the name suggests, the recipe is two-fifths rye and three-fifths wheat, although that is approximate.  I will test a half-and-half one at some point later and let you know whether that works as well, which I think it will.

The method used for this bread is simple, and is described in detail in the (successful) no-knead post.  I suggest you read that once as then you will not have to ever read it again (it makes sense).  The only things I can add that are specific to the rye bread are that:

• I was really really generous at covering the banetton with wheat bran (fearful of the stickiness).
• The first rise for this much rye is longer than I suggest for wheat – this bread was left for approximately 18 hours (from late afternoon and overnight till next morning).
• The 2nd rise (in banetton after folding) can also take longer than the 1.5 hours for wheat – I left mine for 5 or so hours in a cool kitchen and then baked it.
• The baking time after the 30-minute mark removal of lid or bowl (whatever you are using), is minimum another 20 minutes, but I watched the bread for about 10 minutes after those 20, and simply took it out when it reached the right color for my liking.  Since the ovens and baking dishes vary, so may your mileage.  My advice is that if this is your first rye bread, watch it.  It should get beautifully deep chestnut-golden brown (rye bread color), and if it is too light it is underbaked.

The recipe is even simpler – and here is where I would like to kick a few of the things you commonly read on the internet, and even in reputable baking books about baking bread, where it hurts.  Why?  Because among a lot of good and useful advice, there are also sites and books (no names or links as usual, you will know them when you see them), that tell you that unless you do X in exactly Y way, your bread will not work and it’s your own fault for being a bread sinner not doing it as the holy internet church of bread bakers preaches.

In my opinion, all four myths mentioned below (I think I will probably point things like this out as I go along, but only four of them make an appearance in this recipe) are so much of what comes out the back end of a cow.  If you do one of those and your bread does not work, something else is wrong (weak starter, wrong flour, etc.).  It is not because you have sinned against the holier-than-thou principles which are nothing but so much hot air being blown where the sun don’t shine.

So, recipe!

• 100-150g sourdough starter, (I feed mine with mix of about 2/3 rye and 1/3 wheat flour before baking rye, half-and-half for wheat breads).  100% hydration (1:1 ratio of flours to water).  It should have been taken out of the fridge and fed at some point within the past 48 hours.  Myth: a lot of baking purists say you should feed your starter every 8 or 12 hours or oh god oh god it will die and nothing will work… that’s a load of [unmentionable substance].  If you have a strong and healthy starter (one that wakes up and rises within 12-24 hours of being taken out of the fridge and fed), then it is more than fine to do like I do:  I keep my starter in the fridge, and a day or two before I want to bake, I take some and mix it up and let it rise.  It is then fine to bake with the next day or two.  No, I am not hallucinating all those well-risen breads on this blog.
• 350ml cold tap water.  Myth:  you must gather the first morning dew from the petals of lilies, or get the purest mountain spring water you can find, because the chlorine in tap water kills your yeast!  No, it doesn’t.  Your water does not need to be bottled, brought in a wooden pail from a mountain spring, or filtered unless you live in an area where it is otherwise not safe to drink (like London).  But if you can enjoy drinking your tap water, so can your starter.  People who go on about how you should use bottled water for baking bread are… let’s not go there.
• 500g flour (200g wholemeal finely ground rye and 300g bread-quality high-protein wheat flour).  Myth:  you must always sift your flour.  No you don’t need to sift any of it for bread-baking – weighing it and dumping it into a bowl, adding salt and spices, and swirling around a bit with a dry whisk or a spoon before adding liquids is also just fine.
• 2 teaspoons salt.  Use a measuring spoon.  Myth:  you should use un-iodized salt of one fancy and expensive variety or another or it kills your yeast!  Truth – no; regular iodized table salt is fine.  The trace amount of iodine in it is not enough to kill the microorganisms in the starter.
• 1 tablespoon caraway seeds.  If you don’t love caraway as much as I do, use 2 teaspoons.  Or none, if you don’t want any.  (No, I do not feel the need to toast mine before adding it, but you can if you like.)

Method (the post linked above details it better, but here is the summary):

• Mix starter and water.  Mix all the rest in a bigger bowl.  Mix liquid into flour mix.  Cover with clingfilm and let stand for 18-20 hours.  Dump out onto a VERY well floured board.  Fold, rest 15 min, stick into banetton to rise.  I left mine to rise for nearly 5 hours but it may have been ready before I came home from my walk, so when it is puffed up, it is ready.  May be as little as 1.5-3 hours for the rye.  Bake, cool on rack, do not cut until completely cooled (more important for rye than wheat breads for flavor development).

Enjoy.  And don’t take [manure] from those who tell you baking bread must be difficult.  It really, really does not have to be.

Submitted to Yeastspotting.  :)

How (not) To Glue Yourself To Kitchen Counter (adventures with rye bread)

This post is dedicated to all those well-meaning bread-baking books and blogs which I have consulted regarding baking rye bread.  They have all been full of good and helpful (no sarcasm) tips and explanations, and the result of my efforts has been lovely and very, very worthwhile.

Finnish 100% Rye Sourdough Bread

In fact, these worthy sources have even mentioned, offhandedly, that rye dough tends to be sticky but that I should not add more flour because it will not become any less sticky from it.  That’s fair enough.  There is just one thing none of them thought important enough to mention – and that is, that by “sticky”, what they actually meant is – it’s a bloody glue!

No, I am not exaggerating.  If you’ve made wheat bread, or even part-rye bread, you have no idea what this means.  Allow me to elaborate:  the dough will be sticky and it will remain sticky.  And it will stick to your bowl, utensil, stainless steel mixer dough hooks, your (floured) kitchen counter, and yes, your hands.  And gods forbid you let it set on your hands for a few minutes while kneading it, because – get this! – it will then be difficult to scrub off even with liberal use of dish soap and a nail brush under running (cold) water.  I’ve never encountered anything like this short of superglue – paint and regular wood glues are normally easier to get off hands than rye dough!  In the end, I had de-ryed my hands with just that bit of extra effort and scrubbing, however.  So, here’s your warning – by floured surface and hands, all those helpful sources mean: cover that counter with a thick layer of flour when you do the final forming of the dough, and drown that sucker in flour, else you will never be apart from your kitchen counter, bowl or utensil you happened to grab again!

Now, if this has not made you run away screaming discouraged you, I will, by all means, share my other insights (other than the “don’t try this at home unless you do own a nail brush”) into making a 100% rye bread.  All in all, glueing self to items aside, it is both, doable and rather worth the while.

The bread is absolutely fantastic – it fills the entire apartment with a wonderful fresh rye bread scent while it bakes.  It is aromatically sour (both from the sourdough which I fermented for approximately 20 hours, and from the rye and caraway), dense and, to abuse a buzz phrase, literally packed full of flavor.  A friend of mine, after having tasted it, said that most of all it reminded him of Finn Crisp, only in softer bread form (they actually have a caraway version which really does taste similar!).  The texture and density allows it to be sliced into very thin slices with a sharp serrated bread knife without breaking.  We’ve eaten it lightly buttered with Serrano ham, heavily buttered on both sides and toasted for breakfast, and simply sliced with dinner.  If you like sour rye and strong flavors, this is the bread for you, and I can’t recommend it enough!

... goes amazingly with thinly sliced salami, garlic, dill and robust-flavored chanterelle mushrooms, too!

This recipe for Finnish Sourdough Rye is adapted from Jan Hedh’s “Bröd” (“Bread”) book, which I can happily suggest to anyone who wants to bake bread and can read Swedish, or, failing that, Danish or Norwegian.  Sadly, the book is not translated into English (that I know of), but this is what I am here for (tonight, anyway)!

Before I list the recipe, a few notes regarding 100% rye bread in order not to confuse expectations:

1. Rye has a low gluten content, and therefore cannot develop the typical elastic dough texture the way wheat flour does.  The dough will remain dense and somewhat chunky, with a slight wet-sand texture even when it has risen.
2. Pure rye will never rise as high as wheat or wheat-blend dough does.  The loaf will not be a “brick”, but it will be fairly dense, with close crumb and small pores.  It will be heavy for its size compared to wheat bread.  This is a recipe of Finnish origin – those of you who know what traditional Russian breads are like, this will be similar to those.
3. This recipe requires a 12+ hour fermentation period, so it is best to prepare it over the course of two days, unless you want to be baking in the middle of the night at the end of day 1.

Yield:  2 breads

Ingredients:  Day 1

• 250ml water, finger-warm
• 125g active rye-fed sourdough starter (wheat starter will do if it rises properly after a feeding of rye flour)
• 400g fine wholemeal rye flour

Ingredients: Day 2

• All the dough made on day 1
• 30g fresh yeast
• 180ml water, finger-warm
• 500ml sourmilk or buttermilk
• 675g fine wholemeal rye flour
• 30g sea salt
• 1 heaping tablespoon caraway seeds (entirely optional but I like)

Instructions: Day 1

• Place flour into a large mixing bowl and mix in starter and water.  I use a handheld mixer with dough hooks on low speed, but I am sure a larger mixer or a spoon and putting one’s back into it will work.
• The dough will be pretty thick – add more water by a spoonful if the mixture is too obviously dry.
• Cover with cling film and allow to ferment for 12+ hours (from midday to morning the next day in my case) in a warm non-drafty place.

Instructions: Day 2

• Mix cake yeast into water and allow to stand 10 minutes.
• Add all other ingredients except salt to dough from Day 1, and mix on low speed for 10 minutes.  (You can mix with a spoon or knead with a hand in bowl, but in case of wholemeal rye, a mixer really does wonders.)
• Add salt and mix another 5 minutes.
• Place in a slightly oiled bowl, cover with clingfilm and allow to rise for an hour in a warm place.
• Prepare 2 baking sheets lined with parchment.  I use aluminium mesh sheets so that they can be placed directly in a hot oven, but you can preheat your pizza stone if you have one and place breads onto that when done proofing instead.
• Take dough out onto well-floured surface and cut in half.  Form two round breads and place on baking parchment.
• Allow to rise at room temperature for 60-90 minutes until roughly doubled in bulk and the dough surface has begun to visibly crack.
• Preheat oven to 250°C.
• Place your bread sheet (I did this one after another, not two together in the oven) inside, or use a board or peel to transfer your bread onto your pizza stone if using, and toss a few ice cubes into the bottom of oven.
• Shut the door quickly and watch the oven for the first 10 minutes, adding ice cubes as each previous batch evaporates in order to maintain steam pressure.  Make sure to keep face out of the way when opening oven with steam – this will be very hot!
• Reduce temperature to 190°C and bake another 50-55 minutes until bread is dark brown and sounds hollow when tapped on the bottom.
• Cool on a rack for at least an hour before eating.

Note: After removing the first loaf, I reheated the oven back to 250°C and repeated the process with the second loaf – an extra hour of proofing harmed it not at all.  Also, your bread should come out even more floured than mine in the picture if you want it not to glue you to the aforementioned counter.  Trust me, I’ve learned the hard way!

The bread keeps for up to a week without any sign of mold wrapped in a plastic bag at room temperature.  I’ve frozen one half of one loaf, as the book suggests it will freeze well, but have not defrosted it yet, so the judgement on that is still out.  However, considering how well it kept without it and how fast we ate it, I am not sure I needed to freeze it at all.

Sourdough Experiment Continued – Rye Blend Edition

Since my Sourdough Experiment posts last month, I have spent some time reading about sourdough, and also practicing baking with it.

Part-rye retard-fermented sourdough loaf

The results have been wonderful, and I have found out a lot of very interesting things about sourdough – the chief one among them being that once you get how it works, sourdough bread-baking is not difficult at all, and is actually quite easy to schedule.  The long fermenting times, whether in refrigerator or out, work wonderfully well overnight, which means you do not need to be at home during the day for it to work.  But, I am getting ahead of myself.

One of the first questions I encountered while growing my starter was – is an acetone (“paint thinner” or “cheap nail polish remove”) smell from the starter all right, or is it a sign of something wrong?  I mean, acetone does not exactly smell great, and it is a poison, so it is hard not to wonder if you are doing something terribly wrong and are about to poison yourself and your loved ones.  Searching the net has at first netted me a load of “expert advice” that it’s wrong, bad and it means I should throw my starter away.  Why didn’t I?  Well, this brings us to my friend Sylwia, who comes from Poland, and who is an Nth-generation traditional sourdough home baker, and her words to me, as she handed me a well-travelled Polish starter piece were: “… and you make sure it has a good whiff of acetone, means it is alive, and then proceed…”  So, on I went researching and apparently, those experts who said to throw things away were about as expert as the ones which recommend starting your sourdough starter with commercial yeast – i.e. didn’t know how to find their behind with two hands and a flashlight.  The acetone smell is normal to sourdough starter that hasn’t been fed in the last 12 hours, and it is not actually acetone at all – it is ethyl acetate, which is harmless and produced by the acetic acid bacterial strains normally present in sourdough.  So therefore, my advice is – unless the starter is full of liquid that’s separated, stinks to high heaven, or is turning weird colours, and as long as it rises happily if you take a bit of it and feed it in a clean jar, it’s just fine.

Another interesting discovery I have made is that not all starters produce same-flavoured bread.  As I have mentioned above, my friend Sylwia has brought me a sample of her starter, which according to her has changed hands at least 5 times so far that she knows of (I get to be the at-least-6th proud keeper!).  According to her, the tradition in the part of Poland she comes from (near Warsaw) is that upon moving out on your own, your first sourdough starter should come from a piece given to you by a neighbour.  I guess in my case, one given by a friend counts as well, and now I maintain two retention-sample jars in my fridge, one jar of Sylwia’s Polish-heirloom one, and another of my homegrown Swedish yeast cultivated from local wheat here in Stockholm.  The last bread I’d made was a wheat loaf baked in a pan with a newly-located 12% protein flour and a tablespoon of caraway seeds per 3.5 cup flour batch of dough.  It was the best bread I have ever baked, and one of the finest I’d eaten, and now I am experimenting to see what it was that contributed to it being so wonderful – the pan baking, the caraway or the Polish starter.  I would guess it was a combination of all three, but I do plan to try to combine the factors differently to see which one makes the most impact/difference.  Control group in experimentation is very important!  ;)

As to the bread in the photos, it is a 30% wholemeal rye (finely ground rye flour has been used for better texture) with caraway seeds, which I have done in a single rise with an overnight fridge retardation to extend fermentation time.  Wheat-fed sourdough starter (my own Swedish one) has been used.  This bread was meant to be baked for a Saturday dinner, but I got forgetful and did not feed my yeast until the morning, which meant no sourdough on the day.  As a result, I did not start the sourdough until Sunday daytime, and baked it today (Monday) at mid-morning.  The approximate recipe and instructions follow – you can skip the forgetting and messing up your schedule bits, it works fine without them!

The basic point about scheduling a single-rise sourdough is this -  you need about 12-24 hours for it to rise after the initial knead, rest, knead and shape.

You can start the dough either in the morning, to be raised at room temperature and baked late in evening, or to be put in fridge and baked the next morning.  Or you can start it in evening, stick it in fridge overnight and bake it towards lunchtime the next day after letting it come to room temperature.  Or you can start it in the evening and leave it to rise out of the fridge overnight (provided your weather is not too tropical), and bake it first thing the next morning.  Sourdough is flexible, and since the proofing does not happen too fast, it is not as if missing an hour or two with this will make anything too catastrophic, and certainly not if the dough is left in the refrigerator (what is called a retarded, or cold fermentation – and, as the name implies, is slow and therefore rather controlled).

Double-rise sourdoughs are a little more complex to schedule, and I will be trying them in the future, but in the meantime this works fantastically well (and easily!) for me.

What you need:

• Time:  12 hours to refresh starter, 12-24 hours to ferment, 40 min to preheat oven, 45 min to bake, 1 hour to let cool.
• Optional hand or standing mixer.  I use a hand mixer with dough hooks attachment on low speed.  I imagine that a paddle attachment on a standing mixer (those who own one would know how to set it up), or simple wooden spoon and hand kneading will also work just fine.
• Sourdough starter, fed (refreshed from fridge) at a ratio of 1:2:3 by volume (1 – starter, 2 – water, 3 – flour) in a clean jar.  I used 2 level tablespoons of starter to start with, which makes for 4 tablespoons of water and 6 (level!) tablespoons of flour approximately.
• Other ingredients as follows:

Dough – Ingredients:

• The above starter (all except 2-3 tablespoons for refrigerating for the future bakes)
• 1.5 cup rye flour – I use wholemeal rye, finely ground
• 2 cups high-protein (12%) wheat flour
• 1.5 cups of water (not to be added all at the same time!)
• 1-1.5 teaspoon salt
• 1 tablespoon caraway seeds (if you like them, or fennel, or none at all)

Directions:

• Mix flours, seeds (if using), and salt in a large bowl.
• Add the starter to the bowl and begin mixing with a wooden spoon or dough hooks on handheld mixer (this is what I use, for lazyness’ sake).
• As the starter works into the flour, begin adding water very slowly bit by bit and mixing on lowest speed of mixer until the dough starts to come together.  This should make a fairly stiff dough.  Note: Flours vary in humidity and so does air, so if you are out of water and the dough is too dry, add water a teaspoon at a time and mix thoroughly after each addition.
• Remove dough to a lightly floured surface and knead a few times.  Mixer should have gotten gluten developed fairly well and this is just to smooth the dough.
• Pre-shape into a round by tucking ends under and stretching top of dough into a ball.
• Rest on floured surface and cover with lightly oiled cling film to avoid drying, and allow to rest for 30-45 minutes to relax.
• In meantime, prepare your baking parchment sheet or lightly grease and thoroughly flour a bread pan (whatever you are using).
• Come back to your dough, give it another short and gentle knead (a few seconds), and shape into a round or a loaf for the pan (as per above).
• Gently place onto parchment or into pan, cover with oiled cling film and allow to rise out of the fridge for a couple of hours.
• Wrap in a plastic bag (over the sheet or pan and the cling film), to avoid drying out.
• Place in the refrigerator overnight.
• In the morning, take the bread out of the refrigerator and remove bag – it should have risen to nearly double in bulk.
• Allow to come to room temperature/proof/rise for 1.5 hours or until doubled or more in bulk from original dough size.
• Preheat oven to 220°C.  Remove cling film and slash the loaf to avoid tearing (as you can see, my slashing still needs practice!).
• Set the bread in the middle of the oven, and throw a couple of ice cubes into the oven to create steam.
• Bake at 220°C for 15 minutes, adding 2-3 (small) ice cubes at a time when the last of the water is gone from the bottom of oven.
• Turn the oven down to 190°C and bake additional 20 minutes without ice cubes until bread is medium-brown in colour.
• Using oven mitts, remove bread from oven and from the pan (if using) and tap on the bottom.  It should sound hollow when ready.  (Bread can be returned to the oven without the pan to brown the bottom and finish baking a little if necessary – think 5-10 extra minutes with bottom heat only.)
• Cool on a rack for an hour, or as long as you can stand the smell without cutting/tearing/biting into it.

Proceed with the tearing, biting, etc. as you like!

Yup. Slashing definitely needs more work!