Pride goeth before a fallen loaf

No, not fallen. Never-risen. I should have known better than to trumpet the satisfaction my bread-making gives me; yesterday’s experiment was a colossal failure. Bad inventory management left me without any white bread flour and an excess of yummy durum flour. I don’t normally bake 100% durum anything, so I cast about for recipes and there was one for a 100% durum sandwich loaf that would have me laughing out loud at the audacity of its oven spring. Unfortunately, my ability to bake midweek is shot to pieces. But we needed bread. No problem: reduce the amount of yeast and the temperature, thus extending the time to rise. So that’s what I did.

After a night in the fridge, the dough had barely moved. Again, no problem, take it out of the fridge and leave it on the kitchen counter for the day. That evening, still almost no sign of anything in the yeast department. And this is where hubris kicks in. Why didn’t I just leave it until this morning? But no. I shaped up two loaves -- the dough was lovely and elastic and silky smooth -- bunged them into tins and waited another couple of hours. More hubris. Less waiting. Bunged ’em in the oven. Took them out. They smelled great, but resembled bricks more than anything else.

The weird part is, the bread tasted great. The recipe has some added sugar, and the durum flour is yummy anyway, so the slices were a bit like a lean pound cake, but with the chewiness of cookie dough and the nuttiness of durum flour. But for lunchtime sandwiches, a failure.