Bread ripping apart while baking
I bake bread quite a bit, and while I am by no means an expert of anything like that, I do feel like I have the basics down, and I understand why things happen when I bake my breads. Yesterday I was asked to make Paska for a neighbor, I followed the recipe and everything looked right until I took the bread out of the oven. The nice braided crosses that I had added to the top of the breads had just ripped apart as had the parts of the main loaf. I have also experienced this kind of ripping when I do a braided Challah. It seems like maybe the crust is setting too fast and the interior is still expanding and that causes the rip. These are not breads that you do scoring on, so what should I do? I am attaching pictures of what the Paska is supposed to look like, how it looked before it went in the oven, and how it looked after it came out.
For glazed breads like these, you do not want a lot of oven spring so need to proof them longer. With challah, I get impatient and often have this problem.
Thank you for the advice. I kind of thought that might be the case. I let the bread rise for the amount of time according to the recipe, but I guess that was not enough. Some of the breads did rise longer because I only had so many pans for them to fit in and had to do them in batches. But still had the same problem. I guess I will have to keep experimenting until I get it right.
With every bread recipe, rising time is only a general guide. "Until it's right" is the real rising time - and just as you said, sometimes with an unfamiliar recipe (or unfamiliar kitchen) you need to experiment to know what "right" should be like.
PS: Isn't it a little sad/funny, that other people making other kinds of bread often wish their bread would do this, but it won't? ?