"Bake Home"

I titled this post Bake Home as sort of a portmanteau of back and bake, as I am back home from Alaska and this is the first chance I've had to bake! My girlfriend and I had a little tradition going, I'd head down to her house and make bread on sunday to share with her and her sister's dog. Well, she's gone up in Alaska now, but I headed down to bake (and make sure her/her sister's dog got some bread too).

Today was a triple threat from Bread Baker's Apprentice, Italian Bread 2 ways (commercial yeast and sourdough) and Portuguese Sweet Bread.

I spaced out a bit when I was making the commercial yeast Italian Bread and added an extra cup of water (the recipe calls for 3/4 cup to 3/4 + 6 tablespoons... OOOPS). I didn't realize this until much later, so I added more flour in while mixing it, but I didn't want to add too much because I'd be WAY off the recipe (oh if I only knew...). So I tried to give it a number of folds hoping that'd make it pull together, it did a bit but it was still a very wet dough. I proofed the loaves using parchment as a couche (as well as a new brotform I got for my birthday!). Turned out I didn't flour the parchment quite enough so when I turned them over onto another parchment on the peel... they stuck. Was no big deal, I was able to pull it off without too much trouble, but it was becoming really obvious the hydration on the dough was higher than it should've been.

I tried with a bit of success to slash the loaves, and went to put them in the oven. This is when bad thing #2 struck, one of the two loaves had oozed a bit off the parchment onto the peel, and while a portion of it left the peel... not all of it did. Unfortunately, enough was left on the peel that I couldn't just pull the peel out, it would've pulled the whole loaf out. So I hurriedly scraped the dough off the peel (getting a little burn on my arm in the process), and found myself looking at some sort of strange mutant loaf. The loaf in the brotform was far less exciting, although it did take a bit longer to release than normal. I was surprised for all the horrible abuse in trying to seperate the parchment paper, get them slashed, and get them in the oven; these loaves came out with a fairly nice crumb!

The sourdough version of the Italian bread had no excitement, made a sourdough biga the night beforehand, made the dough today, fermented, shaped, fermented, baked ta da. No burns, no spacing out on recipe quantities. I used my other new brotform for one of these loaves. I need to experiment with that one for a really nifty way to slash it.

And finally, Portuguese Sweet Bread, again relatively uneventful. I needed sandwich bread for lunch at work so I decided to make them as sandwich loaves rathern than in a pie tin as in the recipe. These two loaves made the house smell just wonderful as they were baking.

And my assistant in all of this (be nice to him, he got an unintentional shaving (big misunderstanding with the groomer)

(crumb photos for the sourdough will be coming later when I cut into it!)