Thursday, October 15, 2009

Ultimate Fail Bread

The best way to kick off a new blog is with an embarrassing story, right? So why don't we start there?

Today, I got the crazy bug up my butt to bake some bread. Now mind you, I've done very little bread making in my culinary career, but a friend posted a nice easy no-knead bread recipe on her Facebook page. Can't go wrong with that, right? Right? ....RIGHT?

I got going on it, and within minutes, I was mixing up my batch of bread. My first mistake was not mixing it long enough (which I didn't realize at the time). The recipe called for it to be baked on parchment paper, but I don't do much baking, and as such don't have any parchment paper in my house. I found a package of waxed paper that said "Great for baking!" on it, and figured I'd be alright.

(Now, at this point, some of you might be snickering that I'd make such a rookie mistake and can already tell what's coming. If that's the case, quit laughing, keep reading, and stop being an asshole. Kthxbai.)

So I lay out the waxed paper, and shape my loaves of bread on top. Let it rise for 20 minutes, then pop those bad boys in the oven! I go back into the computer room, and within seconds, I smell something that reminds me of my Grandma's house at Christmas. (No, not my mom's mom, that makes the greatest food ever; my dad's mom. The one that makes sauerkraut hotdish for every holiday and burns dumplings. Yeah, that Grandma.) I race back out to the kitchen and see smoke pouring out of the oven. I pull the door open and yank out the pans, one of which has very obviously singed edges all over the waxed paper. Before I can get the fan going and the windows opened, the smoke detector in the hallway starts beeping, soon followed by the one in the bedroom. Dammit. I got the fan turned on, the smoke detectors turned off, and went back to my lumps of dough. I sprayed the pans with Pam and flopped the "loaves" back onto the pans and peeled the waxed paper off of them.

"Still good! I can work with this!" I thought. I popped them back in the oven, and baked them for the remaining time. At the end of the baking time, I pulled them out of the oven....and I had bricks. More fail. I tried everything I could to make them edible, but it wasn't going to happen.

I will definitely try this recipe again, and learn from my mistakes this time, but this particular instance was just reeking of baking FAIL.

5 comments:

  1. haha....I can't tell you how many loaves of bread I screwed up when I first started baking bread. They came out like bricks everytime. We ate a lot of croutons.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Oh how I know your pain!!! That is why I stick to doing pita and naan. One day I'll have the balls to attempt it again.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hey, I made several that way that made great doorstops the squirrels would not even eat. Come to think of it, The dog wound not even gnaw on them.

    ReplyDelete
  4. So funny! I can totally relate. My first attempt at bread went much the same way. N called them "door stops" they were soooo heavy! Seriously, you could have knocked someone out with them if you hit them. Blech. I haven't tried since, lol. ~ L

    ReplyDelete