Happy Birthday! and Bad Bread
First above all, Happiest of Birthdays to turkchief, one of my dearest and oldest friends -- only not as old as me! HA! Have a great day and a healthy, joyous, prosperous year, Turk!
And now for something completely different:
When Bad Things Happen To Good Bread.
I've often thought that I should post about my bread failures that was not quite successful. It's great and fun to post pictures of gorgeous bread, but it's more educational to post about things that have gone wrong. It's encouraging to other bakers to see that not every loaf comes out well, and it's useful to me to keep my ego from puffing up like... well, like what happened to the bread I'm going to talk about below.
So. Take a look at this photo of a couple of loaves of ciabiatta I made yesterday.
Doesn't look too bad, right? The one on the left looks a bit vulval, but hey, nothing wrong with that! (*Spider is not making jokes about "eating" vulval things; you can make your own just fine. Hee!*) But check out how they look inside. I'm leaving the photo at a large size so you can see it up close.
This is supposed to be ciabiatta. It's supposed to have holes in it you could drive a truck through. It's supposed to be light and airy and lacy. It is not. It is spongy and doughy and it has streaks of unbaked flour in it. It tasted pasty.
I've made this bread before with great success. So the question is, WTF went wrong? From the evidence of the bread itself, and thinking back to what I did, I can make a diagnosis.
Unfortunately, I don't have a photo of the unbaked risen dough, because I didn't anticipate I'd need one. (*Spider makes note for future.*) If I did, you'd see that it was gorgeous and puffy and huge. It was so pretty that I didn't want to punch it down. That was a large part of my undoing.
See, while it was rising I left the house to do some errands. When I came back the dough was over-risen, because I have old-fashioned clanking hissing radiators; sometimes the heat is blasting, and sometimes it's nonexistant. Evidently, while I was out, the heat in the kitchen went thermonuclear and the dough rose more quickly than I expected. I should have punched it down brutally before I split it into loaves and shaped them. That way, the gluten would have had to re-expand and it would have helped form all those lovely bubbles and holes that are the signature of ciabiatta. But it was so pretty that I didn't have the heart to do it. So I shaped the loaves carefully and avoided de-gassing the dough as much as I could. Shame! Woe! Alas! By doing that, I denied the dough the ultimate fulfillment of its glorious destiny. Mea culpa.
Incidentally, I also fucked up shaping the loaves. One of the other reasons ciabiatta is so lacy is the particular way you shape the loaves. You stretch it and flatten it and fold it several times and each time you do, you dust it lightly with flour and oil between the folds. I used far too much flour -- that's why you can see the streaks of raw flour in the baked loaves, and consequently why the result tastes like paste.
These two loaves were shredded and thrown out the back door to feed the birds. No mercy for bad bread!
So, what have we learned from this? Basically, I should have been brutal with the dough and abstemious with the flour. My soft-hearted generosity was my downfall. Tough love -- it's what's for baking.
Thus endeth the lesson.
And now for something completely different:
When Bad Things Happen To Good Bread.
I've often thought that I should post about my bread failures that was not quite successful. It's great and fun to post pictures of gorgeous bread, but it's more educational to post about things that have gone wrong. It's encouraging to other bakers to see that not every loaf comes out well, and it's useful to me to keep my ego from puffing up like... well, like what happened to the bread I'm going to talk about below.
So. Take a look at this photo of a couple of loaves of ciabiatta I made yesterday.
Doesn't look too bad, right? The one on the left looks a bit vulval, but hey, nothing wrong with that! (*Spider is not making jokes about "eating" vulval things; you can make your own just fine. Hee!*) But check out how they look inside. I'm leaving the photo at a large size so you can see it up close.
This is supposed to be ciabiatta. It's supposed to have holes in it you could drive a truck through. It's supposed to be light and airy and lacy. It is not. It is spongy and doughy and it has streaks of unbaked flour in it. It tasted pasty.
I've made this bread before with great success. So the question is, WTF went wrong? From the evidence of the bread itself, and thinking back to what I did, I can make a diagnosis.
Unfortunately, I don't have a photo of the unbaked risen dough, because I didn't anticipate I'd need one. (*Spider makes note for future.*) If I did, you'd see that it was gorgeous and puffy and huge. It was so pretty that I didn't want to punch it down. That was a large part of my undoing.
See, while it was rising I left the house to do some errands. When I came back the dough was over-risen, because I have old-fashioned clanking hissing radiators; sometimes the heat is blasting, and sometimes it's nonexistant. Evidently, while I was out, the heat in the kitchen went thermonuclear and the dough rose more quickly than I expected. I should have punched it down brutally before I split it into loaves and shaped them. That way, the gluten would have had to re-expand and it would have helped form all those lovely bubbles and holes that are the signature of ciabiatta. But it was so pretty that I didn't have the heart to do it. So I shaped the loaves carefully and avoided de-gassing the dough as much as I could. Shame! Woe! Alas! By doing that, I denied the dough the ultimate fulfillment of its glorious destiny. Mea culpa.
Incidentally, I also fucked up shaping the loaves. One of the other reasons ciabiatta is so lacy is the particular way you shape the loaves. You stretch it and flatten it and fold it several times and each time you do, you dust it lightly with flour and oil between the folds. I used far too much flour -- that's why you can see the streaks of raw flour in the baked loaves, and consequently why the result tastes like paste.
These two loaves were shredded and thrown out the back door to feed the birds. No mercy for bad bread!
So, what have we learned from this? Basically, I should have been brutal with the dough and abstemious with the flour. My soft-hearted generosity was my downfall. Tough love -- it's what's for baking.
Thus endeth the lesson.