Baking Blunders - I Need New Glasses

I took the recipe for a ciabatta from the squarish "500 breads" book I bought recently. The ingredients and preparation steps looks easy enough. 510g white bread flour, 440ml + 2tbsp warm water, 1/2 tsp sugar, 1 tsp salt, 1 1/2 tsp active dry yeast, 1 tbsp extra virgin olive oil. I was ambitious and decided to put in a few cloves of finely chopped garlic. Garlic ciabatta, sounds yummy.

Well as usual things didn't go as planned. As I started to mix all the ingredients together except for the olive oil, the mistakes slowly unravel.

• I didn't have enough bread flour so it was a mix of bread and all purpose flour. Ok should be fine.

• I poured all the water into the bowl ... should have let it in slowly while the food processor kneads it. A pointer to remember next time. The mix does seem wetter than I like. I should pour more flour in to thicken it.

A very wet dough, early signs of things gone wrong haha

• Hmmm ... wait a sec. Tsp ... that stands for tablespoon yah? ... No wait wait ... !!! tbsp is tablespoon and tsp is teaspoon! Oh no, what have I done?! Oh boo-ey ... I've messed up the proportions ... sigh~.

Oh well, its too late to correct it now. Might as well go ahead and see what monstrosity of a dough I can conjure up with this mix. And to go with my resolution to be more optimistic I took stock of the extra's I've put in. Ok, extra sugar ... that should be fine, the bread would taste sweeter which may not be a bad thing. Extra salt, that's fine, it'll balance out the sugar. Yeast, wait the portions I put in are the same as the recommended amounts on the packet, so in essence I should be fine? :p

1 sachet to 500g of flour, well that's what I did 'mistakenly'

Although I've managed to convince myself it's not that bad, at this point I'm resigned to failing. That said, since there was no harm in putting this into the oven, I let it rise for an hour and pop it into the oven.

The mass of wet gooey dough after an hour of rising

45 minutes later, presto ... a half-decent looking bread. The good: it actually turn into a bread of sorts! The ok: crust was pretty good, the garlic helped with the taste. The bad: bread inside was too dense. Too much moisture I think.

Looks can be deceiving

Not flaky, too dense

I'm keeping this loaf overnight to make a bread crumbs recipe I saw on TV a few nights ago. Why waste food yah? I'll definitely try my hand at this again. I just need to remember to clean my glasses the next time I do this ;-)

Home Made Bread

Armed with an oven and kitchen mixer, we finally made a successful attempt at baking a loaf of bread. This is a good start and one of our to-do's when we were contemplating getting an oven.

The mixer helped a lot too. We had a previous attempt that didn't turn out as well, I suppose due to lack of effort in the kneading process. My right arm was limp after a 5 minute kneading workout. So with the mixer we could now let it run as long as we like with minimal effort.

Also getting the right recipe really helps. There are a lot of recipes online but many of those don't really work right. So it takes some trial and error to get a suitable recipe you can work with.

I think the next attempt would be a baguette. I've always liked baguette, being able to make my own would be marvellous. Let's see how that goes.