With Your Leftover Poolish...

If any of you are like me, you ended up with too much poolish. Well, worry not, because you can make a delicious sandwich bread with this that will tide you over until bagel time.

First, put 1/2 tsp of yeast, 1 Tb salt and 3 C warm water into the bowl of your standing mixer.
Dump your leftover poolish into the bowl, and add 3 C flour (I like to mix white and white whole wheat). Mix well.
Start to knead (by hand or in the mixer), incorporating 1-2 more cups of flour. The poolish makes the dough pretty wet, so you'll want to add flour bit by bit until the dough is smooth and tacky.
Place the dough in a lightly oiled bowl and set aside until it doubles, roughly 2 hours.
Divide the dough into two pieces, and shape each piece into a loaf (stretch into an oval and then roll up, pinching the seam). Place each loaf in a lightly oiled or buttered loaf pan and let rise for another 2 hours or so--until they double.
Preheat the oven to 475 degrees. When the oven is hot, give each loaf a nice slash down the middle, turn the oven down to 400 degrees and bake for about 45 minutes. The loaves should crest the pan and be golden.
After 45 minutes, slip the loaves out of the pans and put them back in the oven for five minutes.
Take out and cool 1-2 hours before slicing.

This bread is delicious and flexible (I put the dough in the fridge before the first rise; let it come to room temperature and rise when I had time to shape it; and then left the shaped loaves to proof overnight in our chilly apartment, baking them in the morning). I just gobbled a huge piece as a mid-morning snack, and am already leering at it, thinking of lunch.

-Rhi