Bread: Sponge & Dough Method

My sister commented that although the bread I baked was quite delicious, it became hard quite fast. This is consistent with my own observation. Hence, she suggested that I consider a recipe from her bread recipe book: the sponge and dough method.

A brief description of the method, as stated in the book, is as follows:

This method needs a longer preparation time, first of all a sponge dough is prepared which needs to prove for 2-4 hours or even longer. After a second mixing, it has a 15 minutes rest. Then it is divided, mould it round, then fill it with filling and shaped. This method produces a softer, bigger loaf which keeps longer.

One notable difference in recipe (as compared to the basic one I've been using) is the inclusion of egg. Also, it supposed to have butter too but since Ban doesn't take butter, I've replaced it with olive oil.

I tried it on the day I read the recipe. Due to time constraint, I shorten the proving time by about 1 - 1.5 hours and so was a little worried how it turned out. The dough was very soft and elastic. The bread was soft and delicious but a tad sweeter than I would have liked it to be.

I gave some of it to my sister to try. She loves it! In fact, to our surprise, it lasted for much longer than your typical factory-made bread. When we both finished the bread, it was already around 1.5 weeks and yet it wasn't spoilt.

So the description was very accurate: softer, bigger and last longer.

For the second loaf, I tried to follow all the timing that was stated in the recipe i.e. longer proving time than the first time but lessen the sugar content just a tad. Strangely, I personally found the bread to be not as soft as the first loaf but still far softer than the basic bread. Hmmm...I now begin to suspect that this could be due to inclusion of heavier amount of wholemeal flour compared to the first one.