This, ad I hope you’re reading this Mr. Stephenson, is what happens when you rush things:

I started out well. Got up this morning, fed the starter and mixed 100 g wholewheat bread flour with 100 ml of water for a soaker. The idea was to tease extra flavour and structure out of the wholewheat part of the flour. Came home to very active starter which I mixed with the soaker, 200 g rye and 200 g Red Fife. With all the fermentation going on, this should have been good.

Then, when I put the dough together I added the usual amount of  water, forgetting that the soaker alone was extremely wet and that I was over-hydrating. No biggie, I thought, I just add some extra flour to get things back onto an even keel. Which I did, until the dough came away from the sides of the bowl of the Kitchen Aid, normally a sign that all is well.

When I pulled the dough out, I noticed that it was still noticeably wetter than I normally like it to be for these really quite heavy breads. No matter, I thought, a wetter dough means a lighter crust with larger air bubbles.

I was in a hurry, and as a result I didn’t think. And a result of that I didn’t notice that I was talking total nonsense. What I should have done is put the dough back into the bowl and hand kneaded it, while carefully adding flour, until it felt just right. I didn’t, because I was in a hurry. Instead I told myself that it would be fine.

Of course, for a wet dough to work, it needs a large amount of bread flour which has the ability to form long gluten strands to hold the loaf together, not wholewheat and definitely not rye. A wet rye/wholewheat loaf will do one thing and one thing only and that’s fall down onto itself and create a pancake. Which is exactly what today’s loaf did.

Balls. Cock and balls.

When baking works, it is an absolute joy. When you, or in this case when I, get cocky it’ll hit you over the head and kick your butt without mercy. Baking isn’t cooking. In cooking, a dish is too liquid, you reduce the sucker. Not liquid enough, you add some wine/stock/water. Things, generally, don’t fall to pieces just because you didn’t add 1/2 a tablespoon full of this or that. A loaf of bread can and does fail because it needed an extra teaspoon of flour and didn’t get it.

The journey continues.