Bread/Brick Baking

Well, it’s one way to get rid of flour. This was the second batch of bread. The first batch never made it into the oven.  These loaves rose too much, and much too quickly, catching me off-guard. It still tastes good, just a little too tiny for sandwiches.

Note the inked in correction. The first rule of baking bread is to never measure by volume, only by weight.

I got cavalier. My King Arthur 200th anniversary cookbook only lists things by volumes, and everything I’ve baked from there has turned out just fine, regardless of the humidity or type of salt. I was going through those recipes, then grabbed this book of sprouted wheat flour recipes.  This is the simple recipe, with commercial yeast, not home nurtured wild beasts.

I had not tried this recipe before, and simply mixed the ingredients by volume. I poured in 3-1/4 cups of water (did I mention I’m not a morning person? Did I mention this was in the morning?) and noticed instantly that I had a bowl of flour soup. But “..the dough will thicken while it rests” – not that much.

I then went to the publisher’s site looking for an errata sheet for the book. Nope. Then I went to Amazon and read the reviews, and there it was, a review noting this very typo. I poured the dough into the trash can.

So, I tried again, with the corrected measurement. I weighed everything else, just to be safe.

Well, it worked this time, except it rose really well. Too well, and checking on it 10 minutes before I “needed to”, I found it already too high.

Well into the oven they went, and sure enough, they fell to less than half of their pre-oven size. Sigh.

Some days just aren’t for baking. But it tastes good.