I love baking and cooking, and I told my husband anytime we have an extra $50,000 laying around I’d like to go to culinary school. To which he said, “you don’t need to go to culinary school to be a good cook.” And he’s not wrong. There are plenty of excellent chefs with no formal training. Some of these chefs even have their own show on Food Network! So, with that in mind I’ve decided to bake the heck out of my kitchen. I don’t own a stand mixer (which I desperately want) or a bread maker, so I’m doing everything by hand. I have a couple of go-to bread recipes that usually come out quite nicely, but I want to mix it up. So I’ve deiced to try a ton of different types of bread recipes and do them over and over until they come out the way I want. Yesterday was my first attempt. It was a sandwich bread recipe from The Bread Bible. It has a lot of steps, and requires a lot of rise time. I hadn’t read the recipe completely through (my fault) so I mismanaged my time. I made the Starter the night before, then started again just before 7am the next morning. We go to church at 9:30 so I didn’t have a lot of time. The result was very disappointing.
It fell–a lot. I read there are at least 3 reasons why my bread could have fallen. First, I didn’t knead it enough. Which is possible, because the dough was very sticky and I had a hard time kneading it. Second, it rose too long. Again, because of my mismanagement with the time it did sit rising for far longer than the recipe called for. And third, too much yeast. It’s possible, I think. As I was putting in the amount of yeast it called for, I felt like it was a lot. The taste is great. My husband likes it, and Liliana loves it. (She loves anything homemade I make). But I’ll try the recipe again soon, but for now I have the King Arthur Sandwich Bread rising on my counter. We’ll see what happens with that.
Diary of A Good Wife 