June 7, 2007 - 9:34am
FRUSTRATION!
Don't forget about your bread! I tried unsuccessfully to bake alcohol bound with flour today with very disapointing results. Anyone else ever forget his bread? :( So here I go again.
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Don't forget about your bread! I tried unsuccessfully to bake alcohol bound with flour today with very disapointing results. Anyone else ever forget his bread? :( So here I go again.
Ryan--
Yes, I've done it too! Have you ever forgotten to take the loaves out of the oven? Twice now I have had bread on both racks in my oven, taken out one rack and forgotten the other. It is a great way to preserve bread, but that wasn't my intention!
staff of life,
no, i tend to watch the bread bake! but i don't doubt that i will forget one time!
I often proof my bread in the oven, and you see exactly where this is going...turn the oven on for baked potatoes or something, and 15 minutes later life takes a turn for the very much worse.
Both from laughing and from remembering.
It was a Saturday, the day before Easter. We had a bunch of friends coming over for dinner after church on Sunday. I had mixed and kneaded a big batch of bread (the recipe was titled "Egg Braid" -- a challah, for all practical purposes) and put it in the oven with the light on for the first ferment. Then I went out to mow the lawn.
About 20 minutes later my wife came out to tell me that she had turned on the oven to preheat it for the dessert she was making and realized (I think that the smell of baking bread was the clue) that the bread dough was in the oven. Did I think that I could salvage it, she wondered?
So, in I went to have a look. Keep in mind that the dough is in a large, stainless steel mixing bowl, rather broader than it is tall. I took a look and saw that the dough around the perimeter had already started to bake. Not knowing how the still-unbaked dough in the center would respond to such treatment if I tried to remove it from the oven and, not being inclined to throw out at least half the dough, I decided to let it keep baking.
Surprisingly, it rose fairly well and eventually baked to a lovely golden brown. I had to depend on the thump test to determine whether it was finished, since I didn't have an instant-read thermometer at that time. It was kind of dicey, since the loaf was probably in excess of 4 pounds and I hadn't ever baked anything that large.
After taking it out of the oven and removing it from the pan to cool, we had this enormous round loaf. Given its shape and the timing, we promptly christened it "Tomb Bread" because it looked as though it could have been rolled in front of the opening to the tomb.
Although not nearly as aesthetically pleasing as the braids that I had been planning, it tasted just as good and elicited a lot of laughs.
As I remember, the crumb was more open and softer than it would have been if it had gone through the shaping and a second fermentation and then baking on a sheet pan. I've never been brave enough to attempt doing it deliberately since then. What should have been a disaster turned out far better than my expectations, so I suspect that trying to do it on purpose with the expectation of good results might just result in the mess that was originally expected.
Can I claim to be a "no preheat" pioneer, or does the fact that it was accidental disqualify me?
PMcCool