Hi,
First of all let me tell you all that my username is supposed to be ironic :)
I have joined the forum because I can't bake.
I am a fairly decent cook and I continously change and adapt recipes.
I tried the same thing baking... Big Mistake...Huge! But I guess you all already know that.
The first thing I learned this week is that Baking Powder and Yeast are NOT the same thing. So for my first loaf of bread I got a raw piece of dough. I went to bed a little frustrated with the effort but refused to throw away the dough. Next morning i put said dough in the oven to finish baking. Now as you may have guessed it was dry by then so I sprayed with water then threw it in the oven at 325 ( I figured low heat will thoroughly bake it right?) Ok so to end my story I ended up with a loaf good enough to brake a window with.
Now I am sure that I'll be back here asking lots of questions and most will not be smart so Please have some patience.
Joe.
Well, Now that you have brick making down...
Bobby Flay likes to say that cooks cant bake. I think he is dead wrong. To get consistent results from baking you need to understand the science behind it.
If you look at the top of the page there are "LESSONS" Start there. The search bar is your friend, Ask questions=get answers. There are lots of bakers on here who have made every mistake you could ever make.
Including bricks...
allan
.... so I can tell you that if you can cook elaborately, you can learn how to bake.
I've gotten nothing but supportive assistance from the site participants here, so keep at it.
Good luck, and please share your successes with us!
Tony
Hi Joe
Welcome to TFL. I am sure that a lot of us have made bricks before we learned how to bake properly. My first attempts tasted OK but looked terrible and had a texture that was nearly as bad. That prompted me to seek professional help and I went on a course. This site has so much good advice in it that an competent cook/chef may well not need to seek any other help. But you have - hopefully - learned the first rule of baking - Follow the recipe (at least until you have some experience under your belt).
Happy baking
Ruralidle
[quote]... I am a fairly decent cook and I continously change and adapt recipes. ... I tried the same thing baking... Big Mistake...Huge! ...
Maybe it wasn't such a big mistake after all ...it was just that the timing was off.
I find fiddling with bread recipes (both ingredients and procedures) to be a lot of the fun. I recommend soon learning enough that you can reasonably do so. Sure being too casual about following recipes is frequently a lousy way to start out baking bread, but it makes great sense as something to strive for fairly soon (2-month? 3-month? 6-month?).
To reiterate what you seem to have already stated, I think the problem here was assuming that being a fairly decent cook meant you already knew everything you needed to know about bread baking. As you found out, there's a lot of non-overlap between cooking in general and bread baking, and cooking experience doesn't provide a whole lot of guidance to bread baking.
.... for a "Bread 101" experience:
http://www.thefreshloaf.com/lessons/yourfirstloaf
Enjoy!
Wow. This was interesting. It's basic but i learned a lot. Thanks for the link.
Thank you all for the encouraging comments.
I am proud to say that I baked my first "edible" bread. It may not be great and the consistency seems a little variable but hey It tasted great to me!
Here is how it looked...(Yes looked. past tense cause it's all gone)
Not sure if the picture posted. I hope it did.
Thanks all.
Look at that beautiful white plate on that expansive white background, Must have been good, ain't even a crumb left...
Hi, How did you get pics of his bread, nothing was on my thread except text. Wonder how that happens.
Thanks, Jean P. (VA)
[quote]Look at that beautiful white plate on that expansive white background, Must have been good, ain't even a crumb left...[/quote]
"White" background and "white" plate and "not a single crumb" - in other words: no picture (insert laughter here...).
Don't worry, you're not the only one that didn't see anything. The mechanics of posting a picture on TFL are a little different than what many folks are used to, so that bolixing up the first attempt to post a picture is fairly common.
I was in a jocular mood, here is the faq on photo posting. Hope it helps.
http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/2960/posting-photos-faq
Ouch! I guess I fell for that one! Jean P.
Ok Now that everyone has thoroughly made fun of me... I finally learned how to post a pic.
This is my first non-bricked loaf
Hi there,
I was more fortunate than you. You could only smash glass. I was able to use mine as a door stop.............Keep trying....Pete