Loaf 42 – Lesson: Don’t Forget Ingredients

Posted on Apr 27, 2012 in loaves

We had a dinner party for my students last Friday night, and I thought it would be nice to give them all a loaf of bread to take home afterwards. More details about that in the next post (Loaves 43, 44), because this post is about the batch that failed.

I made two 4 kilogram batches of bread, one with the Reinhart’s Lean recipe, and one batch with my original 9 Grain recipe. I mixed the dough on Wednesday night, planning to retard the fermentation in the fridge until baking time Friday morning.

The problem was that I forgot to add the honey to the 9 Grain mix before blending it in with the 4 kilograms (almost 9 pounds) of mixed white and whole wheat dough.

Adding the 9 grain mash - oops, without the honey

I realized my mistake an hour later, after I had done a series of stretch and folds and built up a nice gluten structure in the dough. Hoping to remedy the problem, I mixed in the honey anyway. This broke down all the gluten structure that had developed, and it never really recovered.

I fretted about this all day Thursday, not knowing whether I had ruined it or not. Once I realized that I had time that night to mix a whole new batch properly and still have it ready for baking on Friday I was able to relax. But I was very curious about the impact of what I did.

After mixing the new batch (properly), I decided to bake four loaves of the bread Thursday night and if it came out okay I’d gift three of the loaves the next morning to friends.

Interior crumb, much denser than it should be for this loaf

Bottom line: four loaves and 2k of unbaked dough straight into the trash. The dough didn’t rise as much as it should have when proofed, and it experienced very little oven pop. It was shot. I’m very happy though that I was smart enough to start over, even before I was sure the first batch was a total loss.