As you can see from the picture above, things didn’t exactly turn out as planned. I’m deliberately not calling my baking experiment a flop, but rather a work in progress. Nothing is a flop, as long as you learned something from it and I definitely learned.
You see, when I decided to bake my own bread, I went on the Net and typed “How to make your own bread”, and was presented with no less than 117,000 results. Every single one labeled itself as “easy”, but there was nothing easy about them. In addition, there were very few plain bread recipes, a lot of them were speciality breads, such as banana bread, poppy seed bread, gingerbread, etc.
So I turned to my good friend Raymond and his wife Wendy for a recipe, and specified "easy". In no time at time at all, Raymond emailed me back with a tried and trusted recipe and I set to work.
I followed the recipe to the letter and then I got to the part where it said “This will make 4 BIG loaves, 6 smaller ones, or a few dozen buns.”
4 BIG loaves, 6 smaller ones, or a few dozen buns!!!!!!
Next, as instructed, I let the dough rise for 3 hours, then punched it down (also as instructed), filled four baking pans and popped them in the oven.
And I think I made another mistake there … maybe I should have put the kneaded dough in the baking pans straight away. After all, if I punched the risen dough down, why would it bother rising again?
So that’s another lesson learned, next time I’m going to fill the baking pans right after kneading.
Yet while the breads were less than perfect, the bread rolls came out pretty good. What’d you think?