nawl

This week's cooking misadventure.

I had originally intended to make bread for dinner yesterday. But our yeast is getting old and feeble, so the dough had barely limped through its first rise after 4 hours. So I punched it down and decided to check back in another few hours, and promptly forgot about it all evening.

At midnight, the dough had exploded out of its industrial-sized bowl with now dried-up dough tentacles, and subsequently collapsed a bit in the middle, one of the things you're definitely not supposed to let bread do. This was amusing, so I smashed it down again and put it in the fridge overnight.

The next morning it had exploded out of its plastic container and was beginning to form tentacles again. Time to shape. And forget about all afternoon.

Later, I checked back on my "loaves" (blobs on a cooking sheet--we only have one loaf pan) and three of them looked... normal. Whoa. One of them was apparently sitting on the hot part of the top of the fridge, and had melted outwards instead of rising up. That would be stealth loaf above. Baked for an hour or so. The bread that resulted was perfectly fine. Crunchy crust, soft and not too dense in the middle, and relatively vertical for pan-less loaves. Go yeasties. Next time maybe I should try that sponge thing, though.