If you read here on a somewhat regular basis, you know that I love to cook and experiment in the kitchen. It's also no secret that I really don't care for baking. It's not that I don't like baked goods, I certainly do, but baking always seemed like it was such a precise and exact science, while my style of cooking was always about not following recipes as they are written. In other words, my love to experiment in the kitchen never translated well to baking. I've left more than a few cakes flat and cookies that were black on the bottom and undercooked on the inside. Besides, Shannon loves to bake, so that's her thing.
Last weekend, however, I don't know what got into me. I got this wild hair that for the first time ever, I was going to bake some artisan bread and post the process her on the blog on Tuesday.
Shannon received this book, Baking Artisan Bread: 10 Expert Formulas for Baking Better Bread at Home, for Christmas from our friends K&J.
It's a wonderful book with a DVD included that is perfect for both the novice bread baker as well as the most experienced. (I highly recommend it if you're at all interested in baking bread).
Anyhow, things were going really well throughout the process. We made the starter and let it rest. We made the dough and let it rise, and then rise again. I formed it into two really lovely loaves and set it aside just like the directions specified, to rise one more time before going into the oven. At this point, everything is going well. The bread is behaving. It's looking good and smelling even better. I was feeling quite smug about it. Big mistake there.
The instructions said to warm up the oven to 450 degrees 30 minutes before the bread goes in. I did that. I also put the baking stone on the top rack and a 13X9" baking pan on the bottom rack (for steaming). I guess the idea is that when the bread goes in, everything in the oven is a consistant temperature. Check.
By this time, my family leaves and I stay at home to make dinner and get the bread in the oven. I'm feeling way confident. The loaves look great. I even split them, brushed the tops with butter, and topped them with a lovely mixture of poppy seed, toasted sesame seeds, and kosher salt. See? Don't they look purdy?
Now keep in mind that while getting all of this together, I'm also trying to make Pad Thai for the first time. While it's not difficult, it's got a lot of prep work, and a lot of different steps. I've got the Pad Thai pan going on the stove.
So I go to put the bread into the oven, but first I have to add the water to the baking dish to create the steam in the oven. And with one quick turn of the wrist, all the confidence I had in bread baking literally blew up in my face, as the Pyrex pan exploded into a bazillion shards of 450 degree hot glass when I poured the water into the pan. It blew glass all over the oven, all over the open oven door, all over the kitchen and kitchen floor, and of course, my hand. Can you say BAM? This was a big BAM, or maybe even a KER-POW! Oh yeah, and one big mess (the pictures don't do the mess any justice at ALL).
I stood there for a few minutes of pure shock and awe. I truly did not know what to do. My jaw was just hanging open, as I stood at all the pretty, sparkly pieces of Pyrex in my oven. Oh yeah, and my Pad Thai was now burning on the stove.
There was no way I could start cleaning up the glass right away, because it was too hot! First thing I did was check the bread, which had been out of the line of fire. It was salvageable. Yay. Then I turned off the oven to let the glass cool down. I got a metal scraper and scraped as much of the glass from the open oven door into a stainless steel bowl, so that I could close the oven door. In the meantime, I had to toss the dog outside to keep her from trying to eat the "tasty morsels" all over the kitchen floor. Oh, and of course I had to take some pictures, cause it's what I do.
It took a good half hour to clean up the glass outside of the oven, but I managed. At that time, I continued with dinner, and reheated the oven so that I could finally bake the bread (yeah, with the shattered glass still on the inside). I did put another pan on the bottom rack for steaming, but you can bet it wasn't anything that resembled glass or stoneware. I baked the bread, finished dinner, and when my family came back through the door, there was no sign of the chaos that had taken place a mere 45 minutes earlier (with the exception of an open bottle of chardonnay).
In the end, the Pad Thai rocked, as did the bread. But you didn't see me touting it on my Tuesday recipe entry. If Gordon Ramsey was here, he'd have featured me on Kitchen Nightmares....
Smugness never pays.
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