I consider myself to be a fairly good cook and baker but I have a couple of Achilles heels. One is pie crust. I can only make “short crust” aka crust that is made with butter not crisco or lard. Even doing this requires a tremendous effort on my part to get it right.
My other Achilles heel is yeasted bread. I’ve tried a number of recipes, techniques, read several books but still haven’t really gotten it down. Being particularly persistent, or perhaps stubborn, I decided to give it another go this weekend. I found a recipe for french-style country bread which seems relatively easy and didn’t require “shaping” which is often where my bread efforts go sideways. I gave myself LOADS of time to ensure the dough proofed sufficiently.
Alas, my efforts were not as successful as I hoped they would be. I didn’t get the rise I think I should have out of the dough, despite using the full proof times, using the oven as a proving drawer and using techniques to test that the dough wasn’t under proved. I’m starting to wonder if perhaps my yeast sucks. Alternative maybe the second proof was messed up by covering my dough too tightly with plastic wrap?
On a plus side, the final product had a super think crunchy crust like a french loaf SHOULD and one of the loaves got a significantly better rise than the other. Which is both makes me happy but also puzzles me. Seriously it was the same batch of dough?! Why would one rise better than the other? So new bread cookbook in hand from the library, I’m planning on giving it yet another try next weekend. If at first you don’t succeed…