BREAD

Food Disaster

Simon Munn

• 1 min read
Well, sort of.
I wanted to create a dough with a high liquid percentage as a few friends have said how the higher the liquid ratio, the more likely for a delicate crumb structure and a crusty exterior.  I also wanted to make a milk loaf, so I made the decision to combine the two.
Up until now, I’d been adding around 300-320ml of water to 500g flour, a 60-65% mix,  Ideally, I’d want to to be going for 75-80%, so my recipe looked like this

Ingredients
500g Wholemeal Flour
1.5tsp Salt
7g Instant Yeast
300ml Milk
100ml Water
and I had an avocado that needed using, so I threw that in because my previous experience using one worked well.

The dough was vey wet and I used a K paddle in the Kenwood to mix it.  However, it did rise, in fact it rose a lot.  I left it out for an hour before placing the dough in the fridge overnight, to get that lovely deeper flavour.
In the morning, the dough had gone down, which means it over proofed.  No problem, I simply beat the air out and shaped the dough into a round tin and two small loaf tins.  Sure enough, they rose again.
I placed them in a really hot oven (230 degrees) and cooked for 35min.
After cooking, I wasn’t too convinced they were cooked, so I dropped them back in for a touch longer.
Now, it must be said that the loaves that came out had the best crust I’ve ever done.  However, the taste was awful!  It was far too acidic and really did disappoint me.  In all disasters though, come some learning points:
  • best crust ever so far, probably due to the moisture content
  • milk must have accelerated the fermentation process, hence the acidic flavour
  • didn’t need to be left over night
  • probably used too much avocado
  • should have used all the dough in one tin, not try to make small ones and a flatter round one
So my next effort will be simple white bread with the increased moisture, all in the one tin to see if I can get to that classic loaf.