As many of you will know, today in class we will be making brief presentations that will inform and update the class on the goals and progress of our projects. Like you'll need it! I'm sure alllll of our classmates await each addition to "the Great Bread Experiment" on bated breath...But just in case you haven't been following the blog religiously, today will be your chance to talk to us directly about our passion for medieval bread and ovens, and we will be happy to answer any questions you may have - including what it sounds like when a piece of slate explodes, what it smells like when you indadvertedly set a towel on fire and leave it burning unnoticed in the front yard, what the expressions on the faces of onlookers look like as your wheel an orange shopping cart 5 kilometres, and what it feels like when a dog steals 75% of your bread. In short, it will be a tantalizing preview to our upcoming website!
AND, as you may remember, Team Bob discussed the possibility of bringing in some freshly baked bread to class for the presentation. And today that possibility becomes a reality! I have been up baking all morning and I am happy to say that after carefully guarding the dough from the rouge Theft-Lord of a dog I live with, all 6 of the loaves I prepared have actually made it into the oven this time!
While the experimental side of our project is pretty much over for my part, this bread is not exactly the same recipe as we used earlier, and unfortunately, because I didn't reeeeally feel like getting up at 4 in the morning so I could heat the terra cotta pot oven and bake each loaf individually for 35 or so minutes (I know...not an A triple plus there...but you get bread and I had an annotated bibliography to work on!), they are currently baking in the regular oven.
So I am not 100% confident in how this bread will turn out because I had to make quite a few changes to my materials and methods. I used the oat bread recipe rather than the rye one because it was unanimously declared far superior to the rye bread recipe, but as I said before, this recipe, while not from a primary medieval source, only contains ingredients that would be available to medieval bakers - flour, salt, sugar, water, butter, oats, eggs, and yeast.
I decided to triple the recipe, so had to make a few alterations to the recipe because I didn't have enough of some of the ingredients to keep the original proportions. I didn't have quite enough butter, so I used a bit of oil to top the fat content up. I also didn't have quite as much flour as the recipe calls for, but actually when I put it all together it was still super dry, which was weird because that didn't happen when we made bread on Sunday. I am still not sure exactly why that was the case, but I added a bit more water, and then added some honey when the dough was still rather crumbly. The dough was not as soft as the first batch, and again I am really not sure why, but I hope that the end product won't be too dense. Also, I decided to bake these loaves at 375 because in the last batch the loaf baked too fast on the outside. These guys are all in together, so that will affect things as well. So I am really not sure how these bad boys will turn out, but they are baking as I type this and they smell pretty good! Hopefully we will end up with something edible to tempt the class with today, but I am a litter nervous! As my grandmother always says when I flip out a bit about cooking, "Well, everything that went into them is good, so how can they not be?" So let's hope she's right! (She is 90, and bakes like a champ, so she's got experience on her side).
UPDATE: I had a look at the bread and it is getting quite brown on the outside, but doesn't seem quite done on the inside. It seems avoiding the hard exterior/mushy interior is to me as turning left is to Zoolander. I lowered the temperature, so cross your fingers!
No comments:
Post a Comment