Having said that, we have been fairly successful picking mushrooms (milk caps and ceps, but I won't go into greater details here) in the New Forest. We dried quite a few ones and had pasta, quiche and scrambled eggs; a true mushroom bonanza!
And then I turned my attention to bread making (as Ana was busy with the quiche). Things were looking promising! For the first time, the yeast was doing what a yeast is supposed to do when you activate it. It bubbled and the surface became frothy. I mixed 50ml of boiling water with 100ml of dry cider, dissolved 2 tablespoons of sugar and then added 3 table spoons of yeast. Cool. (It seems to work, but since then Ana told me that alcohol doesn't just affect people, it also makes yeast sluggish.)
In the meantime, the following ingredients came together: 200g of white strong flour, 200g of rye flour, a good share of butter, a table spoon of maple syrup, a tea spoon of salt. Nothing that would give reason to believe that problems were imminent.
Mixing everything together I soon started realizing that the dough was a bit tougher to knead than other doughs before, but I wasn't worried. Actually, we both started worrying that after one hour of resting in a warm place (the usual way), it didn't rise. Okay, it did rise, but that was by far not the double size we wanted to see. So we gave it another 30 minutes, and it did look a bit better.
Now came the second time kneading and then it went into the oven for 20 minutes. Now, while usually when things go wrong you might start puzzling and creating theories why the result didn't match the expectations, this time I did make an obvious mistake, which added to the shortfalls of the finished bread:
Our oven is a product of rather strange ingenuity, there is a little switch in the door, so when you leave the door open a bit, it switches to the grill-function. Luckily, the mistake was soon discovered, as the top of the bread was turning black-ish and a slightly alarming smell reached our noses. Then the door was closed and the bread continued baking the way it was intended.
So, what was the outcome? The bread does actually taste surprisingly well and it does look pretty rustic. It also looks rather solid and very flat, which is a bit of a giveaway that things are not quite right. The crust is... well, edible. But only just, and you'd need strong teeth.
What will we do differently next time? First, never grill a bread. It's not a t-bone steak. Second, better drink the beer rather than trying to intoxicate the yeast. Or add it later. Third, rye is a difficult type of flour. Rye bread is wonderful, but when it goes wrong, it really does go wrong.
Nevertheless, I'm looking forward to our next bread. It's got to be better!
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