Carrot Bread by Jim Lahey

This accidentally-vegan bread recipe is all over the internet.  You can even see a video of Jim Lahey baking this bread with Martha Stewart.  It's delicious, with a subtle carrot flavor, the tiny sweetness of currants and the richness of walnuts (although you can't really taste the walnut flavor).  In his wonderful book My Bread, Jim Lahey says there's a "whiff of chocolate" in this bread that is somehow produced by the combination of ingredients.  I did not find this, but I didn't care either, because, hot from the oven with some Earth Balance vegan butter on it, this bread is so good.  I also made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with it (really good).

I made two loaves of this bread in two days because I wanted a better result the second time.  The first loaf was delicious, but the second loaf had a better crumb, rose a bit higher, etc.  I made the first loaf by measuring out (not weighing) cups of flour and used the specified 1.5 Cup of carrot juice.  The dough was a bit too dry and so then i had to handle the dough more than I should have, etc.  Here are my notes for the 2nd loaf that had better results:

Of course, you can buy the carrot juice and save a lot of time.  However, I had a LOT of organic carrots.  So, I used my old Breville Compact Juice Fountain to extract my own juice and I ended up needing 1.5 pounds of carrots.  This yielded 1-2/3 Cups of carrot juice and I needed it all in order to achieve a decently-wet dough.

Using a food scale, I weighed the flour and then the carrot juice, for better accuracy.  It's interesting to compare the volume amount of juice with its weight.

I dry-whisked the currants and walnuts into the flour before adding the carrot juice to the dough, for a more-even incorporation of those ingredients.

I oiled a clean bowl and let the dough do the first rise in that bowl.  When it was time to shape the dough for its second rise, the dough slid pretty easily out of the bowl, so I handled it less.

Once I removed the lid mid-bake, I only baked the bread for another 15 minutes in my accurate, electric, non-convection oven.

It's best not to let this dough sit beyond the 18 hours.  You really want to catch this dough on its way up in the rise.

This first photo below is of the finished bread.  I found an old pottery covered casserole at an antique shop a few years ago for $25 and that's what I use for the Lahey breads.  The 2nd photo is of the properly-wet dough (after the first rise) sitting in a clean, oiled bowl.