Tuscan Bread, take two

Okay, I was impressed enough with the first attempt at making this bread to try tweaking the recipe to get a flavor I like better. I used butter in place of of olive oil and I added a teaspoon of salt the original recipe does not call for. Then I shaped the dough to fit bread pans instead of baking it as boles on a stone. I want sandwich bread, not soup sopping bread.

What came out of the oven was once again a surprise. The crust is soft, the crumb even softer. If I didn't have a good bread knife I couldn't cut these loaves! It's like trying to cut store bought white bread!

The loaves are once again a long ways from pretty. They looked nice in the pans and I should have left them alone, but I scored them just before setting them to bake. The tops deflated a bit. Not a big deal, or surprise as I've yet to get the dough to match the recipe's description of tacky, but not sticky. Both attempts at building this bread have been very sticky. I'm guessing a tacky dough would be a firmer dough? I need to work on that. This batch of bread was made with a KA bread flour starter and finished with Wheat Montanna's white flour. The first breads were started with Gold Medal all-puropes flour and finished with KA bread flour.

I also need to deal with the sweetness that is the finished bread. There is no sugar, honey, or molasses in the recipe, yet the bread is almost too sweet. I added a teaspoon of salt to this second batch and barely noticed a difference in flavor. I'm guessing the sweetness comes from using cooked flour as a base for the dough? I don't know anyone who's ever used cooked flour to make bread, so I'm not sure if I'm getting what I should be.

The bread is so close to the texture and usability I'm looking for that I have to keep working with it. The next loaves I'll double the amount of salt. If that doesn't give me what I'm looking for I try using half as much cooked flour.

Then again, I may stay with the basic recipe and use the lard I rendered from this fatback as a replacement for the olive oil the recipe calls for. There is some magic between lard and flour that doesn't happen with any other fat and flour. I might even work some of these cracklin's into a loaf! If I notice much of a difference I'll render some of the leaf fat I have to make a purer lard, though I'm leaning to saving that fat for puff pastries and candies!