What Not to Do when Baking Bread (A Lesson Learned the Hard Way)

Tuesday I decided to bake another batch of bread. This time though I thought I'd make a sun dried tomato and herb bread. I followed the same instructions as the last loaf and fermented the poolish overnight in the refrigerator. Yesterday I brought it to room temperature, added the other ingredients and kneaded it for 20 min. It rose. It rested. It proofed.

Then came the disaster. The book, which anyone who wants to learn how to bake good bread should buy, said that when you put the bread into the oven to bake you should spray the sides of the oven with water to create steam. This makes for a crunchy crust.

The trouble began when I didn't have a spray bottle. Instead I tossed a shot of water into the oven and it did create steam. Unfortunately 20 minutes later when I went to turn down the oven and rotate my loaves I discovered the oven had gone from 450 to 350. Concerned, I turned up the heat and left it for another 20 minutes. When I returned to pull the loaves out the oven was at 200 and the loaves not even close to being ready.

That's when I discovered I'd doused my pilot light. For some reason, though the oven was on, the house didn't fill with gas. I haven't figured out why yet because surely my move of accidentally dousing the pilot light with a cup of water should have resulted in an ultimate gas explosion. But maybe that only happens in the movies.

At any rate, it took a very groggy Bryan (he'd been napping) and I a good half hour to get the pilot relit and the oven reset. Now that my half baked loaves had completely cooled off, I returned them and baked them again at the right temperature. I tried them this morning, they're not terrible, but definitely not up to their potential.

So let this be a lesson to all you potential bread bakers. Buy a squirt bottle. Don't throw cups of water into your oven. I know it should be obvious, but in a pinch, sometimes the brain convinces you that doing really stupid things is a really great idea.

Fortunately nothing blew up in the learning of this lesson.

Bread Again

Remember that whole thing about how I was going to conquer bread? How I was determined to make an edible loaf? Well thanks to Mr. Daniel Leader and his book, I have succeeded. I've spent the last two days following his step by step directions on how to make a good loaf of country bread. I read, several times, the breakdown of what happens in the milling process of wheat. I can even tell you what the difference is between whole wheat and white flour.

The end result, however, was that tonight we actually ate the bread I baked. That's a first, and I've made a lot of bread.

So I started out fermenting the poolish. Here it is nicely bubbling.


Once I mixed in the other ingredients, I kneaded that sucker for 20 minutes. That's a serious workout.

Here are my two loaves proofing (that's rising for the second time in their baskets, or in this case bowls.


And here they are baking in my oven.


What I learned by using an oven thermometer is that if I set the oven to 400, it cooks at 475, and then if I turn it down to 350, in 10 minutes it'll be at 300. Fabulous, I know. So I'm working out the kinks of how to actually bake in it.

Regardless the final product was not only edible, it was tasty.


I think using organic stone ground flour makes a huge difference. It tastes like good bread instead of cardboard. Now I'm moving on to the more elaborate recipes.

If you've ever considered baking bread you must first buy this book Bread Alone. Seriously, do yourself and your bread tasters this favor. You'll thank me.

All Better

Two weeks later and I now have a new windshield, hood and headlight.

In other news, Bryan thinks I'm getting obsessed with baking bread. Moi? Obsessed? Just because I said I was going to read every word on every page of this bread book before I mixed flour and water again? I thought that given how many of my loaves have met their maker, and then been thrown on the compost pile, it was a good idea. He assures me he agrees.

I already know a couple of places I went wrong:

1. FLOUR. I was using regular ordinary Pillsbury Flour from the grocery store. Apparently this is a big mistake as only stone ground organic flour will give you the good tasting old world style breads that I want to make.

2. Temperature! Temperature! Temperature! Apparently this whole baking thing is a VERY PRECISE science, involving not only measuring spoons (which were only added to my repoirte in the past year) but also thermometers. In order to get the yeast to behave just right, it's important to have the correct temperatures for the flour, water and air. Not to mention factoring in you friction factor (which is how much the dough is heated by your individual kneading style). Yikes! So I can't say exactly where I went wrong in the past because all I have is a candy thermometer, and I only used that for the water (with the thinking, 'well it's within 10 degrees of what the package says, that should be fine')

3. Baking Sheet. Silly me for thinking I could use a cooking sheet to bake bread. No in fact I need a piece of stone or brick or tiles to get the crust nice and crunchy.

These things will be gathered before my next attempt. I'll keep you all posted, as I'm sure you're all routing for me right? right? Come'on you know I'm going to show up to the holidays with a loaf of bread, and if I don't have your moral support it will be inedible. Just be glad you're not my guinea pig - I mean husband.

Sourdough Bread - Day 7

And the results are in! This bread is...(drum roll please) A Horrible Failure!

I know. I'm sad about it too. Crushed in fact. Yesterday afternoon I mixed in the salt, dissolved yeast and white flour just like the Greens cookbook told me to. Never before has that cookbook let me down. Until now.

I kneaded the heck out of that dough, with my hands, and then let it rise two hours until it doubled in size.


After it rose I punched it down and formed to round loaves on a corn-meal-scattered cooking sheet.


I made those cuts so that it could rise without becoming misshapen. I think my first mistake in the baking process was I didn't let them rise enough this second round of rising. I went by the 40minute time the book suggested, but the truth was the kitchen had cooled off and in retrospect they should have been given more time to rise.

Here they are right before entering the oven. Note that they did rise some, you can tell how the cuts have separated.


So into the preheated 425 oven they went. I also heated up a pan that I then poured a cup of hot water into, to create steam in the oven.

And the results:


Not bad to look at, but my god, they were the most sour sourdough I've ever tasted! Bryan was home when I pulled them out of the oven and Eva stopped by after they had cooled. I gave them each a taste and each reaction went like this:
"Oh, it's not as bad as you said" They swallow "My god that's sour"
You see the sourness had a way of growing on you as you chew and swallow. Somehow it just kept getting more and more sour in your mouth. Not like a rancid kind of sour, more like a super-condensed Sourdough sour. It didn't help that as per usual my bread was too dense.

Mel didn't seem to mind though; she was ready for her piece, and she didn't complain that it was too sour.


So after a week's worth of work (Bryan reminded me that most of that work consisted of my sniffing my starter and exclaiming how wonderfully it was fermenting - I like to pretend I know what I'm doing) I'm back to square one.

I was feeling very depressed about this bread baking disaster and about my general inability to bake a decent loaf, when I went to the mailbox and found this:


For a minute I couldn't figure out what someone in Wyoming could possible be sending me, but then I remembered that I had recently made a purchase on Amazon (which also lead to my recent selling of my soul for corporate profit).

I tore open the package and found my ray of hope


He promises to walk me through making a classic country-style heath loaf step by step, in such a way that even I, a proven failure at bread, will be successful. Daniel Leader, I'm in your hands, lead me to bread making greatness. (and yes, that is an iron scorch mark on our ironing board cover, we can't all be brilliant in all aspects of domestic godessness)

Sourdough Bread - Day 6

I was SO READY to bake bread today. I've been waiting almost a week for my starter to be ready and today it was nicely bubbly and I knew it was finally ready. So I cracked open the Greens cookbook, turned to the country french bread page and read what I was to do next to have my bread ready for tonight.

I've been thwarted.

It turns out that after making a starter, it suggest that you then make a sponge, which takes a day to sour. Sigh. OK so the recipe calls for 2 cups of starter, which is all the starter I've made. To that I added 3 1/2 cups of warm water and then 4 1/2 cups whole wheat flour.


This creates a sponge batter, which will sour until tomorrow. In order to make sure it only takes until tomorrow and not longer, I followed their suggestion to place it in the oven with only the pilot light on.


Apparently tomorrow I'm supposed to remove 2 cups to replenish my starter, but since I've used up all my starter I guess if all goes well I'll take that bit and use it to build up a new starter. This is all so complicated, how did anyone manage to feed themselves before Gelson's and Trader Joe's?

Sourdough Bread - Day 4

I had been regularly stirring in the crust of my starter, as the book said to, until I realized it was all crust. Fortunately it was also time to feed the starter, which I did with a cup of water and a cup of wheat flour. The crust dissolved into the batter. It's beginning to bubble and definitely smells sour. A couple more days of this and I may just have a starter that's ready to use.

Sourdough Bread - Day 2

Day 2 finds my starter starting to get a bit stinky.


It's also getting a bit crusty. Though I've regularly "mixed in the crust" as the cookbook tells me to, I'm a little concerned that it's drying out too much before it sours. Fortunately I have this guy to worry for me so I can go about doing other things...


...like blogging.

On a sidenote, that's also what Bryan looks like when I tell him I'm going to do some baking. A holdover from back when I didn't have any measuring spoons and was trying to make muffins from scratch, with no recipe other than my sense of what ought to go into muffins. I had a reputation for a while as a terrible baker. I've gotten better, I swear.

Sourdough Bread - Day 1

I am currently embarking on the most potentially terrifying baking experiment to date, namely: making sourdough bread. Here's the thing about sourdough bread, it's my favorite, but it also requires you to mix flour and water and let that sit out for three days and sour. Gross. So yesterday I mixed up some flour and water (I believe the ratio was 1 1/2 cups whole wheat flower to 1 cup water). It's now sitting on my counter, souring.


I remember one summer my mom was baking a lot of bread in her bread machine. At one point she decided to try to make sourdough and my memory is a little fuzzy on this, but I believe the starter turned green. And she had to feed it everyday. So if my sourdough started turns green and starts singing "Feed me Seymour" I think I'll follow her example and toss it out. Stay tuned for further updates on the process.