Trial by Yeast: Epic Fail

Almost two months ago, Stacie attacked this recipe. Afterwards she informed us about the time required to complete this task. In addition to this, she told us that the recipe size being about twice as big as an amateur baking experimenter should attempt.

With those things in mind, I was not terribly excited to jump in and bake the rolls. So about a month later, I dove in and took these rolls to task. The result? Very similar to Stacie's. Fresh out of the oven, these were a delight. A short amount of time though rendered these to be almost inedible. They turned out to be very dry and dense. Corrina and Stacie can vouch for their mediocrity.


On a nice Saturday, I labored over a pile of dough that had potential. The baker overseeing the growth of this beauty just couldn't steer the reigns. As Stacie recommended, I halved everything in the recipe. That allowed all the ingredients to fit in my 4 1/2 quart mixer. This may have been the deal-breaker before we even began. I am not certain that halving every ingredient exactly in half was proportionally correct. Tom mentioned that everything should be relative to the amount of bread flour.

One of the other issues that Stacie spoke to was that she didnt think the rolls had enough rise. She used the dry instant yeast that you have to activate in warm milk. To that end, I recalled that we all had issues with the yeast the last time. I wanted to circumvent that issue entirely. So I decided to use the Rapid Rise yeast that I could just add in with the dry ingredients. Along with that I used powdered milk. Tom said that would aid in the rise as well.

I mixed the ingredients together and the dough looked good. I set it aside to Bulk Ferment. I left it to ferment for twice as long as in the recipe. Tom said longer is better than shorter, so I took the scenic route.

After it seemed to double in size, I scaled out 2.5 oz pieces of dough. I relentlessly covered each one as Tom stated. I allowed them to rest for 10 and began to shape. Once they were all shaped, they were ready to bake. Or were they?

They still looked like dense doughnut holes, so I brought them outside to let my Yeastie Boy Brethren do they thang. After about 15 minutes, I thought they looked a little more plump so I threw egg wash on and threw them in the oven.

Golden brown, I pulled them out of the oven. They looked great and tasted delicious. They were moist and tender, though slightly smaller than envisioned. A day later, they were chewy and dense. They tasted almost stale. That was that.

Since then, I have started to eat better. Istarted buying Healthy Life Bread. I was convinced that I could make loaf bread cheaper and at the same caloric intake myself. I started with a recipe from a low calorie website for a quick bread. Ingredients included Bread Flour, yeast, salt, suger, water, and olive oil. I assumed that the quickness of the rise is a result of the sugar in the loaf. Nonetheless I followed the specs and came out with a pretty good loaf. Pretty bland, slightly dense, and cake-like.

For my next foray into sandwich bread, I wanted to add some wheat bran to the bread to give it a slight nutritional boost. Followed the recipe but substituted about 20% of the flour with Wheat Bran. The resulting bread did not rise as much, I think it needed more time to rise than I gave it. It tasted better, but was more dense.

For my most recent loaf, I decided to drop the sugar and keep the wheat bran. I wanted to let the dough sit for longer. Well I covered the dough and I left to go to the Muny to see Meet Me in St. Louis. The dough sat for about 4.5 hours. It rose and started to fall. It really smelled like beer, it was very pronounced. I punched it back down, put it in the fridge, and went to sleep.

After work the next day, I took the dough out of the fridge and put it outside for about 45 minutes. It rose quite a bit, then I put it in the oven. This is bar none the best bread I have made so far. There is still room for improvement.

I need to get the rise right so that its not as dense, still trying to figure that out. I also want to do a No-Knead Bread. More to come

Fear and Loaving in St. Louis - Cinnamon Bread Sans Raisins

Here is a corny intro into bread stolen from Alton Brown. (Apologies for the end of this video, that stupid digital camera won't turn off after you start it!)

Well, it started off ok. All the ingredients were there, a little inspiration from a culinary giant, and we are off. Stacie and I shared some Plugras butter and some nice organic suger. The suger tasted like very very light brown suger, some molassas was still around. The granules were a little bigger than that of normal granulated suger, so I ground it a bit in my food processor until I got a similar granulation. I did not use raisins or any other dried fruits because I am not a fan.

Things started off with the activation of the yeast in my warm milk. I don't think it was too warm, but it was warm to the touch. My worry is that I killed off some prospective CO2 belchin' comrades in action. This is absolutely sticky stuff. If I were to do it again, I'd research this part specifically to make sure my yeast was successfully awoken.




I started by adding the yeast slurry, sugar, salt, and milk, then slowly added the flour. Slowly.





First Facepalm. At that point, I realized I totally forgot the Plugras.  The dough was just about done, just looking a little dry.  Adding butter to a dough mass proved difficult, but a few minutes of folding and using the mixer, all appeared well.  Hopefully its not a catastrophic failure yet.






After a bit of kneading with my bread hook, it finally reached a smooth, elastic dough.

As you can see from my neato time-lapse techology, at the end of the fermentation the bread grew only a little.  All that really happened occurred under the hood, just some good ol' autolyse'in going on.


Second Facepalm. There was no excess gas when I pressed down on the dough. I hoped that it wouldn't be too tough in the end. I rolled the dough out into a quasi-rectanglular shape for my egg wash down. My high school math teacher would hunt me down if I said that was a polygram.


After spreading the egg wash and adding the suger/cinnamon mixture, I rolled the rectangle up. Not sure I flattened the dough out enough with the rolling pin because when I attempted to roll it up, it felt like I only folded it in half.





Third Facepalm. After another episode of Watch

Paint Dry
the Dough Rise about a 55 minute proof outside in the 80° humid St. Louis climate, the dough rose about 1/4 of its original size. Fail?


Here is the loaf with its Egg-Wash on top, I added a little more of the sugar/cinnamon mix to the top.


This was the bread with about 15 minutes to go in the bake.



Here is the finished product from many angles. Looks like a success, we shall taste.


As you can see from this shot, the roll is pretty terrible, the man responsible for this has been fired.
The bread was dense and lacked a cinnamon flavor other than the 1/3 that had the roll.

All in all, I could have done a few things better. Doing some things in order, doing a better job of rolling the dough and letting it proof UNTIL it reaches double volume. If I would have done those things, I think it would have been a little better. I would try going a little off script next time, I might possibly add the raisins very early, as Tom noted, so they disentegrate. After tasting Stacie's and Corrina's loaves, the raisins add something to the cinnamon flavor that mine lacked. I might also set a controlled oven proof as well, so that the yeast is a little more happy and in the future, I could replicate the process with little issue.

For my first attempt at baking, I was happy that something slightly edible came out. I will take Lori's suggestion and fry up some French Toast with the remainder this week. That'll do pig. That'll do.