A few days ago I met "Milly."
Milly is our friendly, neighborhood wheat mill. About a year ago, all the ladies in my neighborhood pooled our money together and bought an industrial-grade wheat grinder. I don't know how they decided which woman had to keep this machine in her garage, but I'm pretty sure it had to do with poor rock-paper-scissors skills.
Anyway, I went over to her house and she showed me how to work the grinder. I brought about 10 pounds of wheat with me and it was turned into flour in no time (usually I make my children grind it at home by hand).
I was so excited to use my new flour, I immediately went home and made some whole wheat bread. In the past I've had bad luck with making wheat bread. Instead of loaves, I make door stops. To make sure that I had light and fluffy bread, I added some dough enhancer and gluten powders to the dough.
Then I made the mistake of accidentally doubling the yeast.
I set the dough out to rise and it was getting huge! Then I put it in the oven and my kids were giving news reports every two minutes of how close the bread was getting to touching the top of the oven.
I had visions of that "I Love Lucy" episode where she bakes:
When I pulled the bread out of the oven, my blimp-sized loaves quickly deflated into small, thin bricks (much like those cartoon souffles or my hopes and dreams of being a good cook).
Luckily I now have plenty of flour to try again.
4 comments:
The bread was quite tasty. It just was denser than usual and a little doughy. It was neither hard nor inedible as Lois' self-deprecating analysis implied.
NIGEL -- I'm going to make some more today. I'm determined to make a good whole wheat bread loaf!
If you want to try sourdough, call me and I'll share. But call soon, because who knows how long before I kill the stuff off.
The word verification is "bakin". I'm not lying. It's obviously a sign.
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