Artisan Breads Week 11...the FINAL final

Week 11 the FINAL final

Oh. My. Goodness. It was a disaster.

My final bread was the Multigrain Sourdough Bread from our textbook. I was confident, since I've made this bread before on a few occasions and they turned out very nicely. I followed the directions, put the dough in the mixer and left it there. Came back in about 5 minutes...and the dough was a sticky mess. I kept adding water and flour to it, but the dough just wouldn't come together. Finally I hand-kneaded for a few minutes, which seemed to help, and started the fermentation. To make matters worse, this particular bread requires double fermentation--in other words, it needs to be fermented twice, about an hour or so each.

So not only did this @#$% bread take me forever to make, it also turned out horribly (at least in my opinion). One of the loaf was flat on the top--I mean, like, Pullman loaf flat. It looked like it rose halfway and then collapsed. Did I overproof them?? It was really dense and a bit crumbly, but actually tasted quite delicious. Surprisingly Chef gave me a perfect score, based on color (which was good), texture, and flavor.

I unfortunately had to toss these into compost...the texture was horrible, almost like a really dense quick bread.

The following week, I made the same bread--the same thing happened. I'm gonna keep trying until I figure out what was wrong...

But at least I passed my final with a perfect score!