Dave’s Blog

So, Today I started making bread using Ruhlman’s ratio recipe, and to conquer my this far failure to make bread.

Step 1 was to measure the flour

Weighing the flour

Then mix it and knead it

Sticky dough

Sweet balls of dough!

And then I left it to rise for two hours. What do you do for two hours?

Arise!!! I poked it to see if it had risen enough... it didn't spring back, so it had risen enough.

Then I punched it down and kneaded again and put it in the oven, praying that the bread would not be dense and doughy! I wanted to add some steam to the start of the process, so I had a ceramic casserole dish that had preheated with the oven and wanted to add boiling water to so that it created steam. When I added the water I heard a crack and I knew instantly the ceramic dish had broken. D’oh!

Bake my pretty!!

40 Minutes later I took the loaf out of the oven!! It felt lighter than the previous boule’s, so that was a good start.

Looks good.

It looked good, It smelled good, it had a hollow sound when I tapped the bottom – it even crackled when it came out of the oven like bread should!! Cutting into the loaf and seeing the bread was like a dream come true! finally my bread was breadlike!

Nice!

What do you do with awesome bread – Eat it of course!!

Nothing better than to cover fresh bread with German pork products!

Sweet, sweet Nutella! Did it pass the Nutella test?

So did the bread pass the Nutella test? The bread was fantastic – awesome crust and good inside. Rach said it needed a bit more salt and I agreed, and I think the oven here runs a bit too hot, so next time I’ll turn it down a bit and see if I can get the dough a bit more fluffy!

Coming up – I’ll make the bread again and try some other variations.

I’ve tried to make bread a couple of times now, but each time I’ve ended up with heavy bread because the dough hasn’t risen enough

Bread

The first time I tried Jamie Olivers recipe the loaf was large and heavy. It looked good, but when I cut into it the inside dough was thick and doughy. My second attempt was last week. I tried to make the 5 minute bread a specified here
The bread rolls looked great, smelled great and I thought I had achieved sweet succulent success. I picked up the first roll and it felt a bit heavy to me. Still not disheartened, I cut it open to find the same thick, doughy inside. My heart broke a little.

I left the rest of the dough from the 5 minute recipe for another day in the fridge and I noticed that it had risen some more, so I thought to myself – Perfect I’ll try the rolls again.

This time the rolls looked perfect, smelled perfect and were a little lighter, and when I cut them open hey were a bit better than before, but not good enough they were still too thick and doughy to be edible.

Luckily for me, Rach got me Ruhlman’s Ratio book for Christmas. So, tomorrow I’ll be trying to make bread the Ruhlman way. Success will be mine I think!!