You know what they keep telling you: if you fall off your horse, you must get back on. We were not rich enough to have horses… we had to get back on bikes. Anyway… I had a bread recipe go hideously wrong a week or so ago.
This is the recipe, and it’s one I’ve used quite a few times. It’s a tasty bread that uses both yeast and sourdough starter, the latter for its flavour, rather than to raise the bread. It seemed a little wet when I took it from the fridge after its overnight stay, but it shaped in the usual way, and I put it into the proving basket. At this point, as the saying goes, I must have lost my presence of mind, as I forgot about it for a couple of hours…
The result of that was that it grew hugely, stuck to the proving basket, and made a remarkable mess when I managed to get it out. Scraping the rest out of the proving basket, and adding more flour as I tried to shape it again, I scraped the thing into a baking tin. Well, it was obviously not going to cook on the baking stone in a civilised manner.
Here it is. There was no point trying to score the top. I just cooked it, convinced it would not be worth eating anyway.
It came out like this, with a good big crack caused by the oven spring.
The crumb was very dense, and the crust could do with stronger teeth than I possess, but the flavour was reasonable.
Yesterday, I jumped back onto the bicycle, and used the same recipe. It came out of the fridge looking like dough instead of soup, and it didn’t stick to the proving basket either. Here’s the result. It’s lovely.