My Top Ten Bread Failures for 2010

My Top Ten Bread Failures for 2010

It has been just over 1 year since I started making bread in earnest and with any regularity, and I have been blogging both successes and failures since February 2010.  It is actually more fun to look back on the total disasters I have created, rather than the good loaves.  The failures tend to be more memorable.  Here is a list of my top ten (there are a LOT more than just these 10, it was hard to narrow down the field.  But the top ten failures had to lose in virtually every criteria.  For example, the loaf that my mother-in-law broke her tooth on was actually a pretty nice loaf, and so it doesn't make this list).

Without further ado, here are my top ten bread failures for 2010:



10.
Dough transfer error that not only made for a very ugly loaf, it also burned up one of my oven mitts.  It was a disaster because I tried to bake too many loaves at once, and I got distracted when I was placing the loaves in the hot oven.  The loaves tasted bad, but it might have been because of the flavour of the burning mitt, who knows?  They weren't pretty, either.

The Burnt Oven Mitt.  The Ugly Bread that resulted is at the top of this page.

9.
A German No-Knead bread, that supposedly required no preheating of the casserole dish that it was in.  Well, that's a bad idea, the casserole dish definitely needs to be preheated too.  Did I mis-translate that recipe?

What happens when you don't preheat the casserole dish for the no-knead bread

8.
HBin5 bread made from pumpkin puree.  One of the many loaves that I've made that are underbaked, and have caves in the middle.  Sometimes it doesn't show up until days later when I'm eating the loaf.  I have invested in an internal thermometer, I just haven't got around to using it yet.

Another underbaked loaf: strange gooey cave in the middle of the loaf.

7.
A loaf that fell apart when I shook it from the pan.  This has happened more than once, but this was the worst.  Very upsetting, especially when the loaf takes several days to build.  Another symptom of underbaking, I presume.

Shaken baby syndrome: disaster when this bread, my baby, is shaken from the loaf tin

6.
This was one error after another, starting with the mistakes I made in the hydration of my starter when I was refreshing it.  Every fix I attempted, it just made things worse.

Hydration error

5.
This was one of those 'detox loaves' that I've experimented with: the idea being, you make the bread a whole wheat loaf by using the all purpose flour but adding swirls of bran and germ in the middle of the loaf.  This one got mouldy before I could eat it. 

Mouldy bread

4. 
The Seventh disaster was supposed to be a 'Strong Rye Bread", but it turned out to be a 95lb weakling that got sand kicked in its face at the beach.  I didn't follow the directions.  One of my earlier rye attempts.  Rye still intrigues me and frustrates me.

What happens when you ignore the recipe methods and just follow the recipe ingredients

3.
This disaster was supposed to be a Lombardy loaf, made for Easter.  The pressure was on, but my bread was a failure.  This one didn't bake long enough, and was so gooey inside it was inedible.  My wife took over and baked one that turned out a trifle dark.  I guess she just wasn't taking any chances.

Utterly gooey inside, not even a little bit baked

2.
An oft-repeated bread failure, that I just don't seem to be able to learn from: but this was the first time I tried to use my old, depleted mother-starter in a recipe.

Sourdough discard bread: why use the discards, why not use the unspent sourdough?

1. 
And the number one bread failure for 2010: this one is fairly recent, proving that I really haven't learned anything at all!  What didn't go wrong in this bread (if you can call it bread, which probably you shouldn't).

The most misshapen and under-baked loaf of all: worst of the worst of 2010

123 Bread Fail

1...2...3... Fail

I was jonesing for some bread.  I was completely out, already a day previously having eaten my last crust.  But I couldn't bake on the 21nd, I had to do all my last minute Christmas shopping.  So it was on the 22nd that I baked.  And I guess my exorphin depletion was so bad, my hands were shaking, my eyes weren't seeing straight, I could barely measure the ingredients.  The two loaves I baked were total failures.  This was the worst of them.

I eat it, nevertheless.  I shove the rough slices into my junkie mouth, tasting them with my junkie lips.  I'm addicted to bread, even this awful, miserable loaf.

I had been reading the adventures of another bread head, hmcinorganic, who posts on the Fresh Loaf Blogs.  Good ol' hmcinorganic: he, or she, whoever it is, made a whole wheat sourdough that sounded interesting to me.  They made a "123" Sourdough bread, with Whole Wheat. 

Ah, the Fresh Loaf Blogs.  At least they are a community of like-minded addicts.  Me, I'm on my own.  Not even as interesting as a social drinker.  I'm a closet bread-eating junkie.  And at times like these, I think its just as well.  My bread is obviously not ready for prime-time.  A couple of people this Christmas season asked me for one of my loaves of bread.  No sir.  My bread ain't good enough for human consumption.  As evidenced here.

Mis en place

I admit that I like baker's percentages, rather than these 123 conceptualizations of the bread (as in 1 part starter, 2 parts water, 3 parts flour(s)).  hmcinorganic used 9 oz, 18 oz, and then 27 oz for the bread he/she made.  I measured mine out in grams, but it is the same 123 ratio (the salt is just 1 Tbsp, not really counted in the 123 formulation):

• starter 255g
• water 510g
• apflour 510g
• wwflour 255g
• salt 15g

For my starter, I had 15g of rye starter @100% hydration, and 120g each of wwflour and water.  I only waited a couple of hours before adding the rest of the ingredients (except salt -- for the salt, I waited about 6 hours).  I should have refreshed it more fully, more recently; I should have given the starter a longer head start; I should have been less in a rush.  I could have used some commercial yeast, too.

But I needed that exorphin fix.  I was in a rush to get to that rush.

 I waited 6 hours before adding the salt, to give my sourdough wild yeast a head start

 Then I kneaded in the salt

 And I set the dough in a bowl to rise

What went wrong?

Leaving aside the 15g of starter, the total flour 885g is 100%; total hydration 630g is 71%.  So why did this bowl of dough jiggle like jello?  That is not such a high hydration dough.  I saw it jiggle, I stretched it and folded it a couple of times in the bowl before turning it out into a highly floured basket.  It felt more like a 90 percent hydrated dough -- had I mismeasured?  The dough was in the bowl 14 hours -- probably too long, but we had to go and cut down our Christmas tree); then the dough was in that basket an hour and a half before I preheated the oven.  Was it overproofed?

 Before one of the in-the-bowl stretch&folds

 After one of the in-the-bowl stretch&folds

 Just before putting it in the basket

I guess I should have seen that it was too sloppy to make a nice free-standing loaf.

I guess I should have realized that there was no gluten structure to hold it up.

I guess I should have floured my basket a lot more.

 Dough in the basket: is it too tired?

So it wouldn't come out of the basket onto the stone (I suspected this, so I decided to skip the step of putting it on a pizza peel).  I ended up just upending the basket onto the stone and closing the oven on the whole thing, hoping that in 10 minutes it would harden a nice exoskeleton and would then come out of the basket more freely.  Junkies looking for their fix don't think clearly.

 Keeping an eye on the upended basket in the oven so it doesn't burn

 Just get the dough out of the basket already!

Of course, with my basket on a hot stone in a 450 degree oven, I had to watch it carefully so it wouldn't catch on fire.  This made me very nervous.

At about 8 minutes in, I decided that the basket was getting a bit brown and I'd better remove it before it caught fire. 

The dough just blobbed out onto the hot stone.  I thought, maybe if I give it one more stretch and fold here on the hot stone, maybe it will at least not drip over the side of the stone.  So I shaped it one last time, right in the oven.

Ay Carumba.  What a mess.

This is just sad.

And then, just to top it all off: it is not even baked long enough.

These crumb shots don't do it justice.  It really is still gooey inside.

 Look at the goo on that knife!

 The junkie, with trembling hands, cut himself a slice and toasted it, not caring what it looked like.

Bread only an exorphin junkie could love.

Notes to Myself

• Where to start?  So many mistakes here, you can't really call this bread.
• I bet that not even would the chickens eat this.  You must eat it all by yourself.  As punishment.

Everyday Bread #10

Brot ohne Kneten

German No-Knead Bread

The other bread that caught my eye this past weekend while I worked nights was a Brot ohne Kneten, a German No-Knead bread.  This was another bread that was supposed to have a long fermenting period -- of 18 hours minimum.  I made this bread more or less alongside the Bauernbrot during this past sleepless weekend.

The dough amounts are roughly the same as those that Lahey uses for his method of baking in a Dutch Oven; however, the hydration percentage in this German recipe looks to me to be a bit more wet.

But the interesting thing about this bread, to my way of thinking, was not that it is baked in an enclosed Dutch oven or Casserole dish in a very hot oven, very similar to Lahey's method, or that the hydration was slightly different than his.  What intrigued me were the comments of several people who tried the recipe and really liked the results: one said that they didn't have to heat the Roman pot before baking.  Another said that they even decided to forego the shaping step, and they merely fermented the dough and cooked it right in the same pot!  Well I had to try that! 

Fitting the 18 hour fermentation into my schedule was a bit trickier.  I decided to bake it in on Monday morning, when I got home after working my final night.  That meant I would mix it up on Sunday afternoon when I awoke.  The fermentation period was about 18 hours, give or take an hour.

• 400 g Flour (1/2 rye, 1/2 wheat)
• 320 ml Warm Water
• 1 1/2 tsp Salt
• 1/4 tsp Dry Yeast
• 1 pinch Vitamin C
  
  Mix dry ingredients and add water.
  Mix by hand until nothing is dry.
  Cover the bowl with foil in a cool basement for 18 hrs.
  The dough should be bubbly.
  Knead only as envelope fold and put in Dutch Oven.
  Heat oven to 250 degrees C (482 F).
  After 5 min in 250 degrees C, reduce heat to 230 degrees C (446 F).
  Bake 30 minutes.
  Then take the lid off and bake 18 minutes longer.
  

Most of the ingredients are in this picture.  I also later crushed a vitamin C pill and tossed in a pinch of that to the flour mixture too, before adding the hydration.  In the comments to the recipe, in a response to a question, the author wrote "Vitamin C is a 'propellent', it makes the dough softer and increases the volume."  He did say that it wasn't absolutely necessary to make this bread, though.

The directions say to mix it up with the hands. But I didn't have to: it mixed up with a spoon quite easily - which you can't really do, with Lahey's dough. To my mind, that was because there was more water in the German recipe than Lahey's recipes, making the German recipe easier to mix up. Or did the German recipe require more water because their flour is different from ours? I wouldn't know the answer to this until the bread was baked.

I did use my hands to kind of shape it a tiny bit, in the bottom of the crock pot, but I wouldn't exactly say that I was forming it into a ball.  After all, it still had to rise 18 hours.  I just wanted it to be fairly cohesive so that I could compare the dough at the start with the dough in the end.

After the 18 hours, this dough was not really bubbly.  It looked rather dense.  No real rise during the fermentation that I could see.  I was dubious about it.  But the pot where I had mixed it up and let it rise still had its lid on, and there was moisture dripping from the inside of the lid.  So the dough is moister than it looks in the picture.

I baked it in the same pot, skipping the stretching and folding stages, and omitting the preheating of the crockpot - just to see what would happen,

It baked, but there was no oven spring.  That wasn't the worst of it, though.

It wouldn't come out of the pot.  Whereas with Lahey's methods, I just invert the pot and the loaf comes tumbling out of the pot into my expectant oven-mitted hands like a newborn, this loaf was well and truly stuck.  I spent a good ten minutes just trying to loosen the sides around the loaf with a bread knife.  After getting burned on the very hot crock pot a few times, I decided to let it cool down and I went to bed.

When I awoke, I tackled getting the loaf out of the cold crock pot.  There was no way it was going to come out intact, so I started digging.

A short time later, I had this mass of crumbs and moist bread bits strewn about the kitchen counter, and a vast clean up job on my hands.  Was this nothing but my latest bread failure?

I nibbled a few of the pieces before tossing them in the bin.

Hey.  Not bad.  Kind of moist.  If I could cut some of these a bit thinner, they might toast up nicely, I thought.  This will go good with some old cheddar.

And I was right about that, at least.

Notes to Myself:

• Shaping the loaf (either with the letter-fold technique, or some other method) will add to the oven spring effect.  Don't ignore this step, no matter how wet the dough: think of a way to stretch the dough that will impact the dough's crumb the least.
• Pre-heat the pot you will cook it in.  The time it takes to do this will easily offset the time you will save in clean-up.  And the bread will be better for it.
• This dough is worth another try, the taste is wonderful.  There is no molasses in the recipe, but it almost tastes like it, the rye is so sweet and moist.