I screwed up making bread =(
A couple days ago, I put up a topic asking for tips on making bread by hand. Those who responded said it was easy and that bread is forgiving. I took hope and made my bread this morning and it came out terrible! The outside is hard as a rock, but the inside seems to be soft. I havent tried it yet, but i stuck a knife in there. Can someone tell me what I did wrong? The ingredients I used were just flour, water, a little salt and honey, and yeast. I let the dough stand in the refrigerator overnight and baked at 400 degrees for about an hour (until the outside was brown). I must have done something terribly wrong. =(
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21 Comments:
Maybe your yeast was dead. You can check it by adding a little (about 1/2 tsp) to about 1/4 cup of water, and give it a few minutes. the yeast should bubble if it's good.
beth1 at 12:44PM on 08/30/08
Ouch! Is just the crust hard or a whole layer of the outside?
After you get some good advice from our friends here, remember to just get up and get back on the horse. :-)
Blue Iris at 1:04PM on 08/30/08
Don't feel bad. It took me a while and many flubs to make bread.
I have one particular disaster I will share with you. I attempted Parker House rolls for Thanksgiving one year. The didn't rise and were so dense my husband and my two boys took them out in the field and took a 9 iron to them. Yes, they flew just like a golf ball. So atleast they provided some entertainment.
I figured out I was getting my water too hot and essentially killing my yeast. Test a drop on your forearm, it should be just slightly warmer than that. I also add my sugar or honey to my water and yeast and let the yeast begin to foam and activate a bit before proceeding with my recipe.
Good luck and keep trying!
rlwycoff at 1:51PM on 08/30/08
Can you give us the exact recipe (and tell us whether you deviated from it at all)? That might help us spot the problem.
chgoeditor at 2:10PM on 08/30/08
PS: You say that you let the bread stand in the fridge overnight. Did you allow it to rise completely before putting it into the fridge? (A fridge is much too cold of a place for bread to rise, so if you put it into the fridge while it was still rising, that would have stopped the process.)
chgoeditor at 2:12PM on 08/30/08
Hm. I used "warm" water, though i dont know exactly how warm its supposed to be. Maybe tepid water would have been better. I also did not wait to see the yeast foam. Here goes attempt #2.
terabithia at 2:35PM on 08/30/08
The exact recipe? i did not use any exact measurements. The ingredients were just water, flour, a little salt and honey, and yeast. I did put it in the fridge before it came to a complete rise because it was suggested that you let the dough rise in the fridge. Maybe that was wrong. After I took it out of the fridge, I gave it a few punches and kneaded it a little more, then popped it in the oven.
The entire outside is rock hard, but the inside seems to be just fine. Its dense, and pretty tasty. Maybe I did the baking wrong? Baked it uncovered. Maybe I was supposed to cover?
terabithia at 2:40PM on 08/30/08
Eek.
Don't cover bread while baking.
I know there are some recipes that have you chill the dough for awhile, or say you can and bake later, but bread will not rise where it is cold, and it really should come back to warm/room temp before baking, or it will not rise any in the oven either and will be too cold in the center while getting too hot/overbaked on the outside.
Also, most basic bread recipes call for the bread to rise, then be punched down and shaped, and then allowed to rise again (sometimes for a shorter time, but still long enough to reshape itself) before baking. Other wise you just punch and knead all the air out of it and then bake it, so it will be hard as a rock.
Try following an actual recipe rather than guessing for your first attempts at bread. It will give you a better idea of proportions for when you feel comfy enough to just fling the ingredients in a bowl.
Over-kneading can also cause hard bread.
Good luck!
sadiepix at 3:27PM on 08/30/08
Second of all when you proof your yeast it either is working or it is not. If its foaming in 5 mins it is alive. The water cannot be too hot or too cold did you measure the water temp?
Did you knead too much, too much kneading makes bricks of bread.
Baking is chemistry you have to have measurements until the day comes when you are so good you can eyeball it and feel it. See the right mixture and feel the right texture.
If you are a beginner you cannot do this. Do not give up get back in there and keep trying.
Here is my recommendation, try that no knead bread, yes you haev to knead it a bit but like 10-12 turns and it will get you used to measuring and eyeballing.
http://www.sullivanstreetbakery.com/recipes/noknead.html
Give this a try ASAP, its good and easy for a beginner.
Then get yourself a Rose Levy Bernbaum The Bread Bible and Peter Reinhart The Bakers Apprentice
http://www.amazon.com/Bread-Bakers-Apprentice-Mastering-Extraordinary/dp/1580082688
Don't walk away take a deep breath and try try again.
JerzeeTomato at 3:55PM on 08/30/08
And after you plop it in the pan, it needs to rise again. Have faith. Don't think of it as "baking bread". Think of it as ":a project to learn how to bake bread". The first option is pretty much pass-or-fail. The second gives you lots of room to learn.
lemons at 4:35PM on 08/30/08
How long did you knead it for? It's hard to overknead by hand - I underkneaded my first few tries. Most of the recipes I use say about 8 minutes by hand.
I've had better luck with cool tap water than with trying to get it exactly warm enough. I do like to let it sit for a bit with the water, the sweetener, and about a cup of flour to get going before I add the rest of the flour.
You can probably do a first rise in the fridge (I have an awesome pizza dough recipe that calls for that) but then you want to give it a couple of hours to come to the room temperature before baking.
The pizza dough recipe:
http://www.101cookbooks.com/archives/001199.html
A simple bread recipe:
http://www.kingarthurflour.com/shop/RecipeDisplay?RID=R428
ansate at 6:02PM on 08/30/08
Since baking is a science I'd say not following a recipe is a recipe for nothing but disaster.
My first bread was the no knead. Thanks to people and books from Julia Child, Rose Levy Bernbaum, Peter Reinhart, Cooks Illustrated, Dorie Greenspan, King Arthur Flour, and about a million food blogs I can make great bread--but I did plenty of research and I'm still learning!
It's not complicated, but it does take some education. Read up, then try again, you'll be turning out great loaves in no time. And once you get a base RECIPE down, you can then modify that formula to make all kinds of bread--but you still need a good formula to start with.
It's not chili, a little of this and a little of that won't turn out a good product!
bobcatsteph3 at 7:33PM on 08/30/08
Spend the money and pick up the book, a bread bakers apprentice. commit some time, and expect to throw away some bread. look at it as anexperiment, so take notes, weigh your ingredients, write it down and when making adjustments from one batch to another, only change one ingredient.
get this book, it will solve your prblems. it is more like a textbook than a book of recipes, although it has many recipes, good luck and don't give up, your basic recipe is identical to mine.
joessausage at 7:51PM on 08/30/08
i would use filtered water or bottled water since there is chlorine in tap water and it can interfere with yeast, as can putting salt into the water that you use to dissolve the yeast.
bread can certainly rise in the fridge. i often do this when i want to retard the rise, due to time constraints or to develop flavor. but it's true that it should come back to room temp after it's punched down for the second rise.
if your bread is very dense, it's possible that the ratio of flour to water wasn't quite right. next time try just barely adding enough flour as you knead to keep it from sticking.
if you don't like a hard crust, you can paint the top with milk or butter or oil before you bake, which will keep it softer.
cybercita at 9:50PM on 08/30/08
If you didn't let it rise before it went into the oven, that's the major problem. It need to about double in size before it goes in, and if the dough is cold, it's going to take a while to expand that much.
If it rose once before it went into the fridge, then the yeast wasn't dead. If you stuck it in the fridge right after you made it and it didn't rise at all, maybe it was dead, or maybe you just didn't give it a chance. But at minimum you need to let it double in size once, punch it down and shape it -- freeform, for a loaf pan, whatever -- and then let it rise again before you bake it.
There are breads that are baked covered, but you probably don't need to get into specialty loaves until you master the basics.
400 degrees for an hour seems like a pretty hot oven for quite a long time. I usually bake bread between 325 and 375 depending on whether its on its own or there's something else in there with it, and most loaves are done in under 45 minutes, depending on size, shape, etc. There are a variety of ways of testing to see if a loaf of bread is done or not.
As far as a crispy crust, some breads are supposed to be like that, and a lean dough (no fat) will give you that sort of crust (think of the crispy, crunchy crust on a french bread as opposed to the crust on sandwich bread.
While bread is pretty forgiving, there are things you need to learn, like what the dough should feel like when it's been kneaded properly. And it's pretty much impossible to overknead by hand. You could do it with a food processor or commercial mixer, but even with a home stand mixer, you'd have to work it a long, long time before the gluten disintegrated.
As far as formulas, I'd suggest that you follow a recipe a time or two before you start just throwing things together. It will give you a better idea of what ratios you need to use, and what order you need to do things, and what it should look like at each stage.
And proof your yeast with the honey to make sure that the honey isn't the problem. Honey is a natural antiseptic, and some honeys can kill yeast. Most are fine, but if the honey is the problem, try another brand, or just use sugar.
dbcurrie at 2:03AM on 08/31/08
Seems to me that if the bread rose in the first proofing, overnight, and needed to be punched down, there wasn't a problem with the yeast. The thing that stands out to me, and dbcurrie mentioned it, too, was that you did not let the bread come to a second rise before baking. Did it rise the first time? Did it rise in the oven? Your not using at least a blueprint for a recipe could make the texture odd. Reading your last post again, you said it tasted okay. The main problem was with the rock hard crust. 400 may not be the temp you need for that bread. That, plus no second rise to increase the volume of the bread and poof up the texture seems to me to be what made your bread the way it was.
I don't think bread baking is an exact science. Each batch is going to require a little more or less flour according to the amount of humidity in the air and how exact you measure the water. Try again and get a recipe to follow, if not exactly, then in spirit. Good luck. We all start somewhere.
challah at 3:12PM on 08/31/08
Oh, please don't give up. It's sooooo worth learning. I agree with dbcurrie - use a valid recipe before winging it. Baking bread is really a tactile thing and when a recipe reads "knead till smooth," that's exactly what it means. It takes time to knead bread but the resulting dough is amazingly smooth.
Keep trying! You'll do great, I have no doubt. :D
therealchiffonade at 4:14PM on 08/31/08
thanks for all the great suggestions! i'm making my second batch today. =)
terabithia at 4:28PM on 08/31/08
The water needs to be between 110 and 115 F. Always proof your yeast. I use the site called Baking 911 and considering I went from Mud Bricks to Bread, I think the site works... Bread baking is not easy and it is not a forgiving art. I can mess up spaghetti sauce and save it. I can't mess up bread and save it. Everything needs to be very accurate so if you like to cook via a dash of this and a dash of that and toss in some... it's going to be problematic. I know. It took me 35 years to make an excellent loaf of bread.
JoePikeElvisCole at 5:26PM on 08/31/08
I was going to ask if perhaps it was cooked too long? When I cook mine, it only takes about 25 minutes in a loaf pan. You can check it and when you tap on the top, it should sound hollow.
I also only let mine rise for about 2-3 hours and then punch it down, let it rise again for 30 minutes and then let it cook.
Let us know how it goes! I think that the no-knead recipe is by far the easiest thing next to a bread machine, if you want to try it after this batch.
TaraTot at 4:40PM on 09/02/08
hve you tried the no-knead bread recipe??? It was pretty good when I made it. I made a whole wheat version here.
Madelyn
KarmaFreeCooking
MadelynRodriguez at 8:19PM on 09/02/08