Failure: Bread

White bread: the bane of my existence. There are even people with little baking skill who can make bread. So what's wrong with me?

I've been making quick breads for ages, but I've only made handmade yeast bread 4 times now - the first time being about two months ago. I've tried a bunch of different recipes, and they've always been edible every time but still not at all company worthy. It's hard enough just finding handmade bread recipes these days, as it seems to be the consensus that doing it with a bread machine is the way to go, and everybody else who triumphs without a bread machine has some special professional grade mixer and/or oven. STILL, I refuse to believe it's impossible. I've seen it done!

For my first attempt I used a recipe for baguettes from one of my favorite books, Bakewise by Shirley O. Corriher. I love the book, but I shouldn't have tried this recipe in my current situation. It was full of strange little techniques I couldn't do here and special ingredients I could get here (Vitamin C tablets to help the rise??), so in the end what I made was a "no knead bread" without the ingredients that made it "no knead." I couldn't shape it at all. What's probably more comical was that my drafty (shitty) apartment was too cold for it to rise well, so I put it close to the heater which only succeeded it melting it initially, and then baking the surface after. Well, I stuck it in the oven anyway and it came out edible, but incredibly crumbly.

For my second attempt I used a new recipe instead, something simpler, and let the bread rise in the oven on its lowest setting instead of in the open air. I kneaded it a bit more than before. It looked passable as bread but was still pretty crumbly, though fortunately less so than the first attempt (it was much easier to cut it this time haha) but there still wasn't enough kneading. I think my problem is that I lose my nerve to continue kneading because my dough is so sticky and therefore I can never get it to actually be "kneaded" so much as "clumped." I would guess my deal is that I don't add enough flour in the kneading process because it never looks like the doughs people knead in bread-making videos.

Attempt #2

For my third attempt I wanted to spice things up. I had an amazing recipe for salmon burgers and a hankering for an pan (sweet bean paste filled buns), so I made this recipe, filling half with sweet bean paste and leaving half alone for burger buns:

I'd learned some lessons. 1) Let it rise in the oven and 2) KNEAD THE SHIT OUT OF IT. I still don't think I added quite enough flour, the dough wasn't perfect and I did more stirring than kneading, but I was actually able to make roll shapes, which is clearly an improvement. The ones I'd filled with bean paste were a little inconsistent, thinner in some places, thicker in others (gotta work on wrapping technique!), but neither of the buns were nearly as crumbly as my last few attempts. I would consider this third attempt a pseudo success. It's definitely the closest I've come to success anyway. MAYBE when I try this particular recipe again I'll actually end up with something decent.

For my fourth bread, I said, "Eff this, I'm going to cheat," and decided to make this Irish soda bread. No yeast, but it looks like a yeast bread and that's good enough, right? UNFORTUNATELY, although it was super fast and super easy, it seems my baking soda was dead! It didn't rise well in the baking process and became quite dense in the center. Even when I try to cheat, I am foiled. I like undercooked bread though, not gonna lie, so I still managed to eat half the loaf in one sitting.

THEN even after all this, I ended up with a whole new breed of fail. I tried a pizza crust. Pizza crust should be the easiest one, right? I mean, I used to make pizzas at the carry out restaurant I worked in my freshman year of college. We didn't make the dough from scratch but I knew a thing or two about how to set and bake it!

Well, this is where lazy me struck again. I was making this recipe for Tex Mex Pizza, but given the price of bran cereal here I just went with the toppings of that recipe on this crust instead. Now, I know that if you put too much on a pizza it wouldn't bake properly and it will be too wet. Particularly if you're using a thick layer of beans instead of tomato sauce...but I really wanted a shit ton of vegetables... so I did it anyway. The dough spread well into the pan. I pricked it and docked it as I should, then covered it with the goods and began to bake it. Well, as you'd imagine, it took forever and was still pretty underdone so I just kept on baking it (more than double the recipe time!). I succeeded in cooking it thoroughly, against all odds, but in the end it was more of a pizza muffin than a pizza crust. It was really light and fluffy, probably on account of all the moisture, and it wasn't chewy at all (but at least it wasn't crumbly!).

Apparently I'm learning things after all this failure, so if I could just apply them all at once I might actually be okay next time. For now, my bread-making life is such a comedy of errors and laziness. I've since been heartened, however, as I realized I was unintentionally using 8% protein flour instead of 13%. That makes a pretty big difference to the formation of gluten networks, and so I think I may have more luck next time around just by changing the flour (no matter how I screw up this time!).

It's been a humbling experience to say the least.