Misadventures in bread baking

So yesterday while we were having our regular weekend snowstorm I was hankering for some French bread. Do you know how many recipes there are online for French bread? Only about a gazillion, but they are all mostly the same so I just picked one and ran with it. I thought the dough was a little bit stiff, but decided to consider it an upper body workout and just kept kneading. The recipe made two loaves and they didn't raise as much as I thought they should, but I baked them anyway. One was just normal French bread and the other was the herb bread that I was hungering for.





My first clue as to the texture of the bread should have been whan I was slicing a piece off. A hacksaw would have been handy to get through it. It was a little dense. I ate two pieces even though my teeth protested. I dug the empty yeast packets out of the garbage and checked the expiration date and they are good until 2011. But I think the poor yeast died an early death. This morning I gave one of the loaves to Tim and told him to take it outside, break it up, and give it to the birds. After he went out, I heard a loud noise and looked outside. There was Tim pounding my French bread on the steps trying to break it up to give to the birds. He was whacking it pretty hard, but may have lost some power in his swing, as he was laughing so hard. He finally got it broken up into three pieces and tossed onto the snow on the lawn. The last I looked, there were two jays fighting over it but it didn't look like they'd made a dent in it yet. I think I'll take them out some birdseed in a little bit.

Another thing I made yesterday was dulce de leche, which is literally translated from Spanish as "milk jam". It's actally a delicious caramel sauce that is to die for. Alton Brown made it on Good Eats but it involves cooking milk and sugar on the stovetop and standing there stirring it for about two hours. I had heard that you could also make it from condensed milk, so I went online and found several recipes. The most intriguing involved taking an unopened can of sweetened condensed milk and boiling it in a pan of water on the stove for two to three hours.

Now this sounded like a recipe for disaster to me, but there were many testimonials online from people who had made it numerous times and never had a problem with it. So I got down a can of SCM and my largest saucepan and started boiling. The only warning about this recipe is to make sure the can is covered by water at all times. Otherwise it might explode. So I boiled it for 2-1/2 hours and kept peeking at it and refilling the water to make sure the level didn't go below the can. After it cooled, I opened the can and tasted it. It was caramel colored heaven! So I used it on Tim's birthday cake, but there was so much chocolate on the cake that it was hard to taste the dulce de leche goodness.

So yesterday I tried the other recipe....the one where you take a can of SCM, put it in a pressure cooker with water and cook it for 20 minutes. I figured, why not? If it did explode, the pressure cooker should stop the worst of the can shrapnel and caramel lava, plus I could stay in another room while it cooked. So that is what I did.



This is the pot and can after cooking but before opening the can. As you can see, no disasterous explosions ensued.



And we got the same caramel goodness with only cooking it for 20 minutes. I think a bowl of frozen yogurt with a dollop of dulce de leche is on the menu for dessert this evening. Calories? Fat? It's winter and we need some extra insulation while the snowstorms rage! Tim had a snow day today because the bus couldn't make it up our road, so we've been futzing around in the kitchen and on Xbox all day. At least when we keep busy, the cabin fever doesn't get quite so bad. :)