Throwing away unsuccessful bread?
I am a novice bread baker, and while I am generally very pleased with my bakes, I do mess up sometimes and end up with rather unsuccessful bread. I always try to figure out where I went wrong, and always end up learning from the experience and feel like I improve each time. I guess that's how it goes!
Yesterday I made some breakfast buns and substituted some of the AP flour with sesame flour as an experiment. They ended up dry, dense and hard as bricks. They had a bitter aftertaste as well. I gave some to my mum – she is not fussy and eats pretty much anything I make – but even she didn't like them very much. I am now of course assessing what went wrong.
I put the rest of the buns in the freezer, but just looking at them makes me annoyed haha. In this day and age when so much food goes to waste, I feel bad for wanting to throw them in the bin. But they are taking up valuable space and I cannot make anything new unless I consume them/get rid of them. I am worried they will just sit there forever. Eating my own failed bread just makes me annoyed and unmotivated! I just want to move on and improve.
Sooo my problem is... what do I do with these failed breads? I can deal with a bread that is only somewhat successful. But I don't want to give shitty tasting bread to friends and family that I wouldn't want to eat myself. I just really don't want to eat them. I live in a city so I can't feed the birds (we have a bit of a seagull problem...). I can't be bothered to make croutons or whatever. Simply put: am I a bad person if I throw them out? What do you guys do with your failed breads?
Well, in this case, I would toss it or give it the birds/squirrels, but if you want to prevent further disasters, research recipes so you know better what tends to work and what doesn't. No one wants to spend all that time and energy and cost of ingredients just to toss it all out.
Experimenting is good, but as a novice, it's risky. Only you can decide how many times you are willing to bake bricks as a consequence of experimenting.
Most of my breads turn out just fine, this is the first time I have made something I consider inedible. I will not try this recipe again. I blame the sesame flour! But continue to (cautiously) experiment I will!
As the self-professed bread fail king of the planet Earth, I try to set out what I can for the local birds around my house. And sometimes my bread is so bad even they refuse to eat it and proceed to berate me a la chef Ramsay. It's bad.
But hey, some successes make up for it.
And Imho, I wouldn't feel bad about tossing it.
This post had me laughing out loud.
Maybe I should be more satisfied with my bakes then. I've never had one flop so bad that we didn't want to eat it, but that has more to do with not taking enough risks.
Haha that's amazing! I feel much better now! ?
But sometime I make a savory bread pudding with vegetables like this one:
https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/12280-savory-bread-pudding-with-kale-and-mushrooms
go to waste anymore. I take it for at least two meals a day. Toasting the bread or dipping in gravies makes it more palatable.
drying out the loaf and burning like wood fuel in the winter. bitter sesame? Chew some raw and see if it has gone off. Sesame doesn't keep very long. Learned that the hard way too! :)
I bought the sesame flour online. It was suspiciously cheap. I think that's the culprit. As soon as I mixed it into the dough something felt very off.
I will toss the buns out (rebel!), and make something with rye or spelt, I seem to have much better luck with those ?
In addition to the savoury bread pudding ifs201 has suggested above, a sweet bread pudding is an option.
My favourite, however, is https://www.foodandwine.com/recipes/garlicky-cherry-tomato-and-bread-gratin
Family loves it, and the juices of the tomato soften the centres of the bread cubes whilst the outer edges go crispy with the baking.
Sesame seed is a seed, so it will cook differently than wheat flour. It also would have more oil and go bad faster. I got the same when I first tried baking with coconut flour (definitely need to add more moisture).
I grind up and throw bad bread into the soil. if you have dirt or planter areas, you can feed the soil.