I made bread.
It started badly. I wanted to produce a loaf quickly so chose a baking soda recipe. As I followed the instructions I hit a problem. For some reason I had changed my mind as I shopped for ingredients earlier in the week, and forgot that I bought yeast. I didn't have time to become a baker until this weekend. It was then that I discovered this deviation from the original path to bread.
A consequence was that it would take longer. Baking soda bread doesn't need time to rise before baking; damn.
I hadn't bought bread flour, nope I'd decided on spelt wholemeal.
Another sign of derring-do: I'd wanted a seedy loaf. So in went an amount of pumpkin and sunflower seeds. Does this make me an artisan?
So with "he who dares Rodney" from a little voice in my head, (Only Fools and Horses), I pressed on.
Would it rise, how would it turn out? I'd have to wait a day to find out. The new instructions said to refrigerate the dough overnight after allowing to rise for three hours.
I took it out of the fridge, placed in on a baking tray and left it to stand for 45 minutes. What I saw didn't fill me with much confidence. Should it look like this?
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| fresh from the fridge |
Twenty five minutes in the oven and it looked okayish. It certainly hadn't risen as expected. Tapping it produced a sort of hollow sound, which means it was done.
It felt very heavy and once it had cooled was tough to cut. The house wasn't filled with the smell of fresh bread, it's hard to describe aroma. A faint whiff of alcohol greated me. Maybe the yeast had gone wrong.
It didn't look like the pictures accompanying the steps I had followed. Maybe because I had used different flour, or something else wasn't right. Who knows.
The important thing was how it tasted.
It tasted nice, with a great crunch as I bit into it. So I call that a success.
I'll try again next weekend. What other seeds etc can I add?
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