Mission 6: Italian Bread (Ugh)

January 25th, 2010 Goombah Gourmet Chris

This week I set myself the (overly ambitious) challenge of making some Italian bread. The immediate reason is obvious: the bread made by the local indigenous population — they call it “Italian Bread” too — is really a loaf of Wonder Bread pulled out to look more oval shaped. It’s so damn awful I have a hard time coming up with the right words to describe it. So it’s no surprise that it’s on my Goombah Gourmet list. However, try as I did to reconstruct Italian Bread this weekend, I failed. Miserably. Three times. I have clearly met the enemy in baking bread. I may have gone down in flames this time, but three battles doesn’t decide a war. I’ll be back after I’ve licked my wounds (and read some decent material on baking Italian bread).  I outline the disaster below.

RESULTS: Presentation – 2; Goombaliciousness – 3

The Goombah’s Waterloo: Italian Bread

I’m not going to bother talking about what I did, and describing what ingredients I put together and how, because nothing seemed to work right. It was a disgrace. So instead I’ll just detail the different forms that the disasters took. There were three of them, though the last try wasn’t really all that bad, to be honest. But still a failure. When the store bought Italian Bread from Stop and Shop starts to sound good, you know you blew it.

Try #1: I Wouldn’t Feed This to My Dog

The first time I tried to make the bread I used a recipe from an Italian site that I won’t mention (since the bread was a joke). I did everything just the way the site said — to the T. I was meticulous, like a scientist. The only thing I didn’t have were Bunsen Burners and test tubes. I measured out and followed to the gram every ingredient, every instruction…everything. But it didn’t seem to matter what I did: the dough wouldn’t come out right. On this occasion, it seemed too hard. Whereas it was supposed to be “soft and silky” mine was more “hard and coarse.” At first I figured maybe the author of the recipe just used words in a different way than me. Hey, you never know. So I kept on moving forward, figuring that one man’s “silky” is another man’s sandpaper. I did what I was told, and after letting the dough “rise” for an hour (not much actually happened), I shaped the pieces and then “proofed” them (let them rise a second time).

When I came back 1 hr later, I had a hard time figuring out what had changed from before. My dough wasn’t moving anywhere. Maybe this guy also had a different understanding of “rise”. At the very least, the misunderstandings were piling up fast. There was nothing I could do, though, so I baked the sucker. It barely moved in the oven. No rise at all. This dough was happy the way it was. When I saw no oven action, I knew this wasn’t going to turn out good. I was screwed. With a sigh I just let the bread do it’s thing. Here’s the result.

When I took them out, I actually held a ray of hope. They didn’t look too bad. They were skinny and didn’t rise at all, but they actually didn’t look so bad. Hmm…maybe I had misjudged it? Nope. I tried to press down on the bread, and it was hard as a rock. There was no crust because the whole loaf was crust. It was solid. A Goombah could use these as blunt force trauma weapons.

Despair started to set in (not like the kind you get from reading Kierkegaard, but despair nonetheless). I had followed the directions, but to no avail (that actually does sound Existential). What was I going to do? Well, the first thing I was going to do was to get this hard work to someone who would appreciate it. Gus.

When I gave Gus the loaf, he was clearly happy. He stared prancing around with it in his mouth, proud of his big loaf of bread, all for him. I felt good — at least he’d enjoy this batch of weapons bread. Then I saw him through the back window, burying the loaf in the backyard. Yep. Burying it. Afterward, he went back into the garage and laid down. Either he was so excited by the bread he wanted to hide it from other animals, or he figured it needed to be put deep into the earth, quick. I wasn’t sure which. So I gave him another one.

This time, Gus walked about 20 feet into the yard, dropped the loaf, and promptly walked back to the garage and laid down. It wasn’t even worth his time to bury the fuc*&r. I had one more loaf to go. I called Gus and when he came up to the door, I extended my hand with the loaf and he didn’t even try to grab it like the last two times. He just sat there looking at me. I dropped the loaf on the garage floor in front of him and he looked down at it and then turned away, walking back to his bed. When things get this bad, you know you’re in trouble.

Try #2: Big(a) Up Yourself

I was so mad that I insisted I would try again. Fall off the bike, get back on again. So I read some dough troubleshooting sites quickly and determined that what I needed was a biga. This is a yeast-flour starter that you allow to activate all night long before you mix all your ingredients. Yeah, that’s why my dough didn’t rise. No biga. What an idiot that guy was from the other bread site. No biga! Every Goombah needs a biga! So Saturday night I made one, and left it out all night so that on Sunday morning I could whip up my well rising dough and be in bread heaven all day long.

Okay, bigas look disgusting, but it’s yeast so what do you expect. Anyway, they are supposed to work to get that dough rising so I don’t care if it’s ugly, as long as it works. So the next day I mixed up my biga (which grew nice overnight) and the rest of the ingredients. I then set it aside for the 2 hours required and waited for it to rise up. Two hours later: it hadn’t moved a centimeter. Maybe I need to play some motivating Bob Marley while I do this (like “Get Up Stand Up” or just “Uprising”).

I mean, WTF? Clearly my biga had no mojo. Frantically, I Googled to figure out what the heck went wrong. All I could figure out was that my dough rise locations were not warm enough (which might have been true). So I took the dough and put it near the space heater. Thirty minutes later it had a hard skin. Result?

Look at that dough. Could anything else be more pathetic? That’s got to be the saddest wad of bread dough I’ve ever seen. I felt totally defeated. Only one thing to do:

I never looked into the trash after I tossed it in, but I’ll bet anything that the SOB rose and doubled in size while it was in the garbage.

Try #3: I’m Not Giving Up!!

I went nuts the third time. I departed from the recipe and flew on intuition.Flour was flying everywhere. I was laughing maniacally. If it didn’t feel right, I made adjustments on the fly. I wound up adding 30% more flour than called for by the recipe. Result? Well, the dough was way too sticky (still not enough flour?) and rose a bit more than before, but no where near what it was supposed to do. Maybe yeast just doesn’t work in my house for some reason.

They came out better this time. Eatable anyway. The crust was there, but it just didn’t have the pizazz a bread needs. It was too thin, and not airy enough inside. Gus would probably eat these instead of burying them or leaving them in the middle of the yard though. That’s a plus. I’m regrouping and moving to something else for a bit. I need to read up on baking. Clearly this is an enemy that you need to study for a while. There will clearly be no quick victories here. As the Terminator says, “I’ll be back.”

————

RESULTS: Presentation, 2: Goombaliciousness, 3

I’m just going by the last batch here. Considering that I made three loaves and two of them are still — 24 hours later — sitting in the kitchen, the goombaliciousness can’t be very high. The loaf that was eaten was not eaten with much zest either.  On presentation – how can you hope for anything decent when your dough doesn’t even rise? Bah: 2.

I think the bread at Superfresh is a 3 and a 3, so I’m even underneath that. What a disgrace.

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