Making the wrong bread

It seems I am only able to make the green folding kind, and that just barely - the eating kind seems beyond my apparently well diminished capacities.

I have temporarily (?) abandoned the bread machines for now - by going 'back to basics' (without offending my natural lazy and shiftless Core Being of course <g>) and using just the dough hook on the Kitchen Aide mixer. Seems basic enough, doesn't it?

And, grasping at straws in regard to my bread making failures on Friday, I stopped at the store yesterday and got new bread flour and yeast.  They did have bread flour on sale, but they didn't have the dried yeast that I am used to - they only had the fresh kind in little bricks. So far as I know this is to always be kept refrigerated and even then has a short shelf life. However this did not keep the store from keeping it laying on an open shelf next to the flours. All the foil covered yeast packages looked like they had been opened and then sloppily re-closed. Finding things like this always makes me picture that it has been done by people who own fifty or sixty cats and have their snotty fingered children as assistants.

But what can you do - it was all they had. And how tough can bread be to make? Two cups of water, four cups of flour, some sugar, some salt . . . . pretty soon you have bread. Nutin tuit!

Last night I built an ironing board rack for the laundry room so it wasn't until this morning that I re-started The Bread Making.

Mostly I just trust everything, including women, foreigners, and yeast, but this weird brick-type made me cautious. The recipe calls for two teaspoons of sugar and four cups of water. OK.  So I put a cup of warmish (100 degrees) water
and the yeast cube and the sugar in a bowl and set a timer for five minutes.

After all; no sense wasting all the flour if the yeast isn't going to work, right?

Came back - dead. Set the timer for five more.

Came back - dead. Made some tea. Yeast bowl still looks like dead dishwater. Set in on the heating pad that I had gotten out to rise the bread on.  Five more minutes - still dead.

Hmmmmm . . . . I must have screwed up some how - so: more yeast, warm water, and sugar. This time I warmed the bowl and immediately set it
all on the heating pad. I am taking no chances:  I have a digital infrared scanning thermometer out checking the temperature of the bowl, I have one thermocouple in the faucet's water stream, and another one under a bread pan on top of the heating pad. I'm READY baby!

Five minutes . . . and I think I see maybe the tiniest bit of scum on the top of the dirty yeast water and maybe an almost imaginary bubble. Nothing at all like active, happy, and exuberant yeast.

At that point I figure - damn the torpedos, hey;  if it doesn't work - I'll just throw it all away, like the last four or five attempts, have a beer, call it a day, and act like it never happened.

So I pour the newest bowl of water and yeast in the Kitchen Aide bowl, start the dough hook twirling, and start adding the four cups of flour.  Wow; this is the driest dough ever - it looks almost like a bowl of flour . . . oh wait! That
was just the one cup of water from proofing the yeast - I have to add the Rest of the water. <g>  So I stop adding the four cups of flour and add the four cups of water.

Whew; that was close. But at least now I am back-on-track.

So I add the remaining flour and watch the hook.

Hmmmmm . . . this looks like pancake batter.  Why is it so darned wet? I did exactly what the recipe said; four cups of flour, four cups of water, and th . . . OH! It was four flour and TWO water - not four water! That's why it's so
wet!

Ahhhh well; nothing lost;  I'll just add another four cups of flour. After all; who doesn't like fresh bread? Oh; and I'll need to add another teaspoon of salt too. No worries. Oh; and here's this original bowl of yeast - may as well throw that in - since I'm doubling the flour.

So you have to picture that I'm adding flour and adding flour and adding flour. And the dough is getting bigger and bigger until the dough hook is completely covered and the dough is reaching for the motor, little fingers of dough are
flailing out the top of the bowl like octopus arms dispensing clouds of flour, there is a fine dust of flour everywhere, and the poor straining machine is groaning like an old cow stuck in a mud hole.

Uh oh; this won't do; I guess the Kitchen Aide is too small for this much dough.

So I stop the madness and cut the still sticky batch of dough in half, leaving half on a cutting board and putting the other half back in the bowl.  Then I start the hook twirling again and start adding flour. And more flour and more flour and more flour. About this time I remember that I had failed to calculate for the cup of water from Each Batch of yeast proving. So I don't have the original four cups of water to balance, and I don't even have the eight cups that I thought I
had. I actually have TEN CUPS of water to get enough flour into! Finally after days and days of dusty, noisy, flailing, and blending - it looks at least Something like bread dough.

Normally I would let it rise right in the mixing bowl but this time I need the bowl again - for the remaining dough. My kitchen is just like my brain; stupidly large and impossible to find what you want in.  So I search for a while; all the cabinet doors are open, things are falling out everywhere, clutter, and banging, and clanging, and I have not a single mixing bowl.

After a good bit of this fun I see a silver ice bucket on the floor; left from New Year's champagne, and by squinting am able to picture it as the Perfect Dough Rising Bowl. <g.

Some butter coating and plop the done-dough in the bucket and set in on the heating pad. Then I plop the remaining dough into the Kitchen Aide and the whole whirling, knocking, dusty, messy process starts in again.

By this time it looks like The Cat In the Hat has only recently finished cooking Horton The Who in the kitchen:  there are bits of dough all over the floor, pots, pans, kitchen towels, and utensils of every sort, shape, and color are all
strewn about, flour is everywhere, and I look ready to become an elderly insane kabuki dancer.

I put the mixing bowl of tired dough next to the ice bucket of dough on the heating pad and then find out that I am 100% out of beer. So I just collapse on the kitchen sofa and ponder my options.  In an hour the buckets of dough look bigger so I poke them. I can never remember whether the dough is suppose to pop back or remain dented when it's risen enough and by this point I don't care.
The finger dent stays, I assume that to be the proper response, push the dough down, and start to knead it.

Ten seconds and: oh forget this!  Back into the long suffering Kitchen Aide and it beats them for a while. When I am tired of watching the machine suffer I pop it all out and give it a few half-hearted pushes and turns. When it looks something like a bread I cut it in half and push and roll it into two pan-shapes.

Of course now, with four pans of dough to rise - I find that only two will fit onto the heating pad.  For a little while I try to stack them, then to form a 'rack' out of crap laying around in the kitchen, and think about heading down to the shop to make something.  But finally I figure:  who needs This much bread? I'll put two in the fridge and rise two. If the fridged ones go to the devil - so be it.

The first two got pretty big in their pans; much larger than I ever expected, and I've popped them into the oven. The two in the fridge are looking remarkably healthy too. I know that pizza shops keep their dough from rising by putting it into the cooler. I don't know why that didn't work for mine.

Oh yeah; that's right - I'm ME! <g>

Twenty more minutes and I'll know more.

Let me see here: assuming they all turn out fine, I will have the better part of a day's labor into this thing, and with my ten dollars in supplies, that comes to $172.50 per loaf.  Man! I have just Got to get into the bakery business. Of course at first I'll lose $170. per loaf but I imagine I'll be able to eventually make it up on volume! <g>

stephen
----------