• Posted on:May 15th, 2008
• Comments:No Comment
• Category:Eat and Be Merry

Here’s a tip: when baking bread in the oven — bread that’s been rising for hours — you may want to remove the saran wrap from the bread before popping it in the oven. Just a thought.

Ever start a recipe, get halfway through and just KNOW in your deepest darkest place that it’s not going to turn out? This is how I felt today while attempting to make these little loaves of bread. The recipe is supposed to mimic the “Outback Steakhouse Bushman Bread” one gets in the Outback Steakhouse. Quite honestly, it’s been so long since I’ve been in an OS that I don’t remember what the bread looks like. I do remember it tasting pretty good, though. I figured I’d give it a shot.

As I was mixing the dough I noticed it was a little on the wet side. Now I’m not a bread expert, but I do know what bread looks like in my bread machine while it’s kneading and such. I also know that loaves that are too wet turn out dense and gross. So I added some flour. Just a little at first.

And then some more.

And more.

Until I had probably added at least 1/2 cup of additional bread flour. And it still didn’t look right. But I figured, what the hell. Reviews of the recipe said that it was a wet dough.

The dough rose fine enough, and even though it was an absolute bitch to handle as I tried to separate it into loaves, flour and the dough scraper were my friend. And I even thought they were looking pretty nice as they rose on top of the stove while I hammered out more changes to a web site I’m trying to get launched by the end of the week.

The only way to describe our oven is that it’s a complete piece of shit, and that is putting it gently. I have a habit of checking food well before it’s supposed to be done, because sometimes it decides to cook food in half the required time. I peeked in on the loaves. It looked like someone had sneezed on them. Then it hit me: goddamned saran wrap.

It’s amazing how easy it is to remove melted saran wrap and the skin on one’s fingers using a hot loaf of bread.

I pulled the first batch out, and the loaves looked pretty good. After about 20 minutes I couldn’t resist and cut one open to confirm my fear that the loaves were wet and dense.

No picture, sorry. It’s bad enough to talk about my culinary failures, let alone post more pictures.

I still have four more to bake, and they’re in the oven now. I’m going to let them go for a few more minutes to see if baking the hell out of them helps the interior. I’m guessing not. Even so, the gummy loaves don’t taste all that bad. It’s probably the faintest hint of melted plastic. Goes great with a nice Chianti.