Since plastic aware July I've been baking bread at home rather than buying it from the shops, it took a long time for yeast to come back into stock at the supermarket after the pandemic panic buying too.
But I had a pretty epic fail late last week, the apartment isn't warm in winter, so to proof bread I have to use the oven, heating it briefly and then turning it back off. I covered the bread proofing bowl with beeswax wrap. Can you guess what's comes next?
In making bread at the same time as making dinner, I switched the oven back on to warm, the bread had been proofing for about 15 minutes. But I forgot to turn off the oven. The oven warmed enough to melt the beeswax on the wrap! Oops! And yep the bread had started cooking. There wasn't a rescue so I figured I may as well as bake the bread and see what happens. The heavy lump of dough became...a heavy lump of bread. It does have a nice crisp outside, but zero crumb, zero air and very dense.
The other thing I've been making rather than buying is crackers, so in an inspired moment I decided to see if I could turn the unpleasant lump into awesome crackers.
Thinly sliced I had a lot to experiment with first low and slow at 150c to dry it out rather than brown the outside
- lightly sprayed with olive oil
- not sprayed with olive oil
- sprayed with olive oil and sprinkled with salt
Then at 180c because I couldn't wait
- light sprayed with olive oil
- not sprayed with olive oil
- sprayed with olive oil and sprinkled with crushed dried rosemary
To be honest they were all delicious. I won't be making the bread mistake again on purpose, but I won't be disappointed if a round of dough doesn't rise....
Apparently they were like Melba toast and in fact thinly sliced, toasted, dense bread is an actual thing - and I thought I'd invented something...
I also added the crumbs to my frozen breadcrumb stash, which is my waste saver for any crusts or broken pieces of bread