Ooops

[highlyeccentric]

Things I did not succeed at: fruit buns.

I mean, they taste ok? But depressingly heavy. I gather there's an art to making bread rise properly, and it is an art which I have not mastered.

Using a rather lackadaisical recipe dictated to me over the phone might not have been ideal, either. Clearly I should cling to K's copy of The Bread Bible and not venture elsewhere.

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ED: OMG kayloulee, come home! The granny trolley snapped at my heels all the way home, my fruit buns are dense, and I have spent all day in a very anti-social round of baking things and washing up things and baking more things and WASHING UP MORE THINGS.

PLS TO BE COMING HOME NAO?

Comments

[monksandbones]

In re: buns not rising, assuming they're yeast-buns, I would suggest one of three possible problems:

1) ingredients/rising area insufficiently warm (probably unlikely given that it's summer there). It can really help to use warm water (but not too hot or it kills the yeast). I usually let my dough rise in an oven that I've heated up to 40 or 50 degrees Celsius and then turned off, and I sometimes also add a pan of warm water at the bottom, because moisture can help too

2) insufficient kneading. You really do need to knead yeast doughs for around 15 minutes or whatever the recipe suggests, or they don't rise properly because the gluten hasn't been kneaded enough to do its thing (unless you were making gluten-free buns, in which case all I know is that the situation is way more complicated and they wouldn't rise using normal yeast-bread technique no matter what you did).

3) flour too low in gluten. See comment about gluten-free. I don't know what flours are like in Australia, but depending on the wheat varieties your flour is made with, if you didn't use bread flour there might not be enough gluten in your flour for bread to rise properly. This isn't really an issue in Canada, because the cold-resistant wheat varieties that grow best there happen to be the ones highest in gluten, so our all-purpose flour is fine for bread, but in the US you really do have to use bread flour because normal flour is made with "softer" varieties of wheat that grow in warmer places and have less gluten - often not enough to make bread that rises properly.

Anyway, that is my bread-making learning! The good news is that it's unlikely that the problem is the recipe unless you're trying to bake gluten-free bread with a normal bread recipe. Yeast bread recipes are actually far more forgiving than recipes that have baking powder/soda/self-rising flour in them - other than yeast, water, flour, and a little salt and sugar, you can almost do whatever (although some spices like cinnamon can inhibit yeast growth).

[highlyeccentric]

Oh, the problem's not the -original- recipe, it's in my mother's oral transmission of it and my transcription. ;)

Pretty sure number two was the problem, although it was also fairly cool in the house today, so that may not have helped.