My second post and I'm already writing about a cooking Fail.
I've only started to attempt bread making in the past year and it's been a roller coaster of emotions. A good friend and expert bread baker taught me how to make an "easy" and delicious Focaccia last winter, and the first time I made it, it came out great! The second time, not so much. And ever since, it's been a 50/50 chance with all breads that I've tried to bake. Bread is so god damn finicky! There's so much stirring and kneading and rising and waiting and rising again and waiting that needs to happen and happen right, and if you're having an impatient-check-on-the-dough-every-3minutes-to-see-if-it-rose-yet -kind of day, then it's not even worth trying. My cranberry bread was perfect, my Easter breads were like dense bricks, and my first Italian bread suffered a similar fate.
I thought my beautiful new KitchenAid mixer would change things - revolutionize bread making- but I guess it wasn't as simple as I thought.
I wanted to make a crusty Italian bread to go with my lentils yesterday so I grabbed this recipe off of Cooklikeyourgrandmother.com. The instructions were for kneading by hand, but I figured the dough hook on the mixer does everything, right? So I threw everything in the bowl and set it on 2 for about ten minutes. Seemed like a descent amount of time. The dough was sticky and stretchy just like the good Focaccia I made once so I figured this was good to go. Threw it in an oiled bowl to rise covered in a warm oven. 2 hours later, it kinda rose… I guess. It definitely got bigger, but then when I touched it it kind of shrunk (TWSS). I tried to roll it out like the instructions said but it was so… floppy? I cut it into pieces and let it rise another 50 minutes. At this point the dough had become like a soft, floppy balloon and basically fell apart when I went to transfer it to the oven - See weird twisted loaf on the left. At this point I started to lose hope. They baked for about a half hour and as you can see, the end results resembled flat, hard paddles. They were definitely crusty - and the piece that I could manage to chew tasted pretty good, but overall, fail. I'm not really sure what to do with them… breadcrumbs? weapons? maybe I can clean the foot of snow off of my car with them tomorrow since I'm not sure where my scraper is…
There will be a part 2 to this. I'm not giving up. I need to consult the bread baking kitchen aid expert and then I'll try again.
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