The popular meme is that Post-It notes developed when an engineer made a mistake in formulating a glue for something else, providence in action. Last night I screwed up, twice, tomorrow night I'll likely repeat what I thought would be a disaster of epic proportions.
My wife and I bake our own bread, we generally use a Cuisinart bread-maker but for the last four or five weeks I've been experimenting with sourdough. I've grown two starters, one is potato based and the other is flour based. So far the potato based starter seems to be much more active.
Last night, as has been my twice weekly custom for the last month, I put some starter, flour, water, and salt in the bread-maker to make the dough. I generally add half the water at the start and then dribble water into the the bread-maker until the dough reaches the desired consistency. Mistake number one was that I poured all the water in at the beginning and I didn't have enough flour to dry the dough out to the point that I achieved a good consistency, the dough was consequently a bit to malleable. To compensate I put the dough in a bread pan to rise rather than just oiling the dough ball and setting it on a plate.
Now I generally let the dough sit for an hour to rise and then leave it in the fridge overnight to let the flavors develop. Last night I got distracted, I left the dough in a bread pan on the counter-top overnight. In the morning just after I had a shower I realized my mistake I and expected to come downstairs to find the dough taking over the kitchen. Fortunately the dough had filled the pan and just expanded a bit over the top. Mrs Bugbear had already turned the oven on and baked the bread while I was at work this morning. She called me at work to recommend that I repeat the mistakes in two or three days when we need the next loaf of bread. Apparently my errors resulted in a nice very light and fluffy sourdough loaf.
So I'm going to call it Mrs. Bugbear's Providence Sourdough recipe.
Credit where credit is due afterall.
You do wax melodramatic, don't you?
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I was expecting some news of children rushed to hospital, wife in a car accident, or some such.
Instead I get a banal posting about a bread that worked out. And if it had not, there would have been no bread. OH DEAR LORD! NO BREAD! THIS IS WORSE THAN NAGASAKI AND PENATUMBO PUT TOGETHER!
Melodrama.
Maybe CBC has a job in op-ed for you, Bugbear?
And join such luminary opinion journalists such as Heather Malick? I think not, I have some standards afterall.
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