Well, I have learned many things today. #1 Getting dough to rise can be an adventure.#2 If your dough hasn't done anything in 3 hours, you are probably doing something wrong. #3 Do your own research if you are attempting something new. #4 There is nothing wrong with asking people such as your mother and your chef buddy questions at 10 am.
So I attempted the recipe outlined here. Being that I have never made anything like this from scratch before, I read, reread, and reread the instructions before starting. I had all my ingredients ready to go, and I got started at 7:30 am because I knew there was a lot of wait time involved.
I mixed the four and "vital wheat gluten" (I'm still not exactly sure what this is but I found some at Whole Foods) in my bowl. I warmed the soy milk and vegan butter. Then I had to make the yeast.I had never done this before, so I went by the instructions on the blog. Mix the yeast with warm water and sugar. Okay. What exactly is warm water? Boiled? Tap? Meh, I thought little of this, got some warm tap water, and mixed it up. Wait until bubbly. Okay. As soon as I saw some bubbles I decided that was good, and mixed it all up. Woo! I was rockin'!
I mixed the dough, and got to kneading. Now that was fun! You can get a sweet workout by kneading dough. I made my ball, and put it in my greased bowl to rise.
I checked it in an hour. Hmm, still a little ball.
Next hour came, yeah, still in a ball.
Next hour, I wonder if i did something wrong...
Next hour, I mix new yeast while placing the dough in an oven with an additional bowl of hot water to get it to rise. APPARENTLY, it needs to sit in a warm place. Who knew? My new batch of yeast, by the way, I let sit for 10 minutes, and it was really foamy. Foamy! There is a distinct difference between "foamy" and "bubbly". I think you want foamy for yeasty things.
So, after 4 hours, my dough started to rise. I finally got to roll it out, spread the cinnamon goodness, and slice it up. Then, you have to wait 45 minutes for them to rise more. After this, they cook for 30 minutes.
Finally, after 7 hours, I had my breakfast. They came out actually good, a little tough, I'm owing to the 4 hours of "rising".
Prep time: 7 hours? roflCook time: 30 minutes
Taste rating: 8, surprisingly (I was really hungry though)
Dishes: a good amount. Kind of messy.
3 comments:
Damn, you are patient. Those look tasty, though. :)
Um yeah.. that's it, I'm patient. lol
I napped for like 2 hours after the whole ordeal. :o
Sorry to hear you had such a hard time with this one - usually anyone's first time with making any kind of bread product turns out like your experience. I've made this particular recipe a number of times, and I've gotten the routine down to a couple of hours (mostly waiting). Your feedback on the recipes is helpful - so I will hopefully get some time to tweak the text.
The vital wheat gluten isn't critical at all - it's just there to provide more structure. It's the protein part of flour (the rest is starch). Kneading the dough develops the gluten which makes bread "bready". Too much, and it will be chewy and tough.
You were right, when things didn't start rising after the first hour, something wasn't going right. After about an hour the dough should have risen quite a bit actually. The whole point of letting the yeast get foamy is to give it a head start as well as to make sure that you have good yeast. As you found out, it also needs a warm place (around 90-100 degree, but room temperature works really well for me too) for it to grow and multiply.
I'm sure the second run with these will be better - if you haven't been too scarred by this experience :)
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