Yesterday I had started the grain soaking for my bread. And then I forgot. Shoot -- I didn't want to leave the grain soaking overnight; 24 hours would be too long. But I didn't want to stay up half the night finishing the bread-baking. So I put together the dough and kneaded. Then I put two loaves worth of dough in a 5-qt ice-cream pail. Put the lid on. Popped it in the fridge. In 11 hours overnight it rose to double -- that's all -- not too much, not too little.
This morning I took the bread dough out of the fridge, and let it start warming up to room temperature. After dinkin' around too much with lasagna and paper route and helping a kid make a scale-drawing of the living room, I finally got around to shaping the loaves, letting them rise, and baking. And y'know? It worked! When the world and the to-do list and the schedule just get too too busy for the bread to be made all in one day, using the refrigerator for rising-time will slow down the yeast growth, and make it easier to keep the bread from over-rising until I get to an appropriate time for baking. This is going to be handy to know.
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I will put dough in the pans and let it do it's final rise in the oven. A few times I have forgoten about the dough for 10 hours. Bad, isn't it. I always bake the bread anyways and it does not turn out to bad. The holes a little bigger than I would like but it is still very eatible.
ReplyDeleteTen hours? Oh, Charity, doesn't it just reek of beer by then? When I've tried baking them anyway after over-rising, I don't just get big holes in the bread, but it falls and gets hard and crumbly, and it tastes sour. I have however salvaged some by punching it down again, getting some more yeast softened and kneading it in, and then rising and baking. It's not good. It's not right. But it's better than how my recipe turns out if it over-rises terribly.
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