In this case, soda bread.
For the unitiated (and me) soda bread is pretty much one of the easiest breads you can make outside of the boxed bread machine ones. Most of the ease comes from the fact that it takes no yeast, so there's none of that horrible waiting for the dough to rise and then the punching down and the kneading... Possibly I am too impatient to make good bread, but I digress.
Anyways, soda bread is ostensibly The Easiest Bread since all you need is the ingredients, a baking sheet, and an oven. Of course, the first time I made soda bread it was both crumbly and far too hard for human consumption. Don't ask me how I accomplished this as I have no idea.
But this time I followed the instructions found in Paul Hollywood's 100 Great Breads, combined all of my ingredients until there was no free-floating flour in the bowl (a process that took far too long so I added more milk...oops?), made a ball of bread, smushed it down, cut a cross in the top and popped that sucker in the oven for the prescribed 25 minutes.
In retrospect, substituting sour cream for buttermilk may have turned out to be a mistake as the reaction between the baking powder and buttermilk is a main part of the dough but...
No bread I make can be anything but fraught with problems, and this one was no different.
I exulted at my bread dough looking like bread dough as it went in the oven and retired to my laptop with a mug of tea and Bruce Springsteen's new album.
An untold amount of time later, my dad popped his head in the room and asked me how much time the bread was supposed to cook for.
"25 minutes," I said, removing one of my earphones. "The time left should be on the microwave timer, since I didn't hear it beep..."
My father cocked one eyebrow at me.
"The microwave says 23:03 and it hasn't moved."
I felt color leave my face, jumped out of my chair and ran for the oven. There was my bread, looking like bread. I know the rule about impatient bakers and undercooked foods, but I had to do something, so I popped the oven open and poked the bread.
The problem with bread is, unlike a cake where you can poke it with a knife, there really isn't a way to know when it's done. So I shoved my finger into one of the cracks and deemed it "uncooked...probably" and gave it eight more minutes.
When the alarm dinged this time, I went and removed my bread from the oven. It didn't look any different from the last time I checked but it was slightly less squishy.
Somewhere in my life I must have read something about bread because, unbidden, the thought came to me, "Isn't the way you test to make sure bread is done to knock on it? If it sounds hollow it's done..." Since I had nothing else to go on, I knocked on my bread.
...I'm not sure if it's true advice, but knocking on it gave me a relatively hollow sound so I let it sit on its cooling rack.
My brain decided to take this slight success and run with it, so I have a baguette and a brioche lined up to try tomorrow.
...oh boy.
