Cooking, Baking and More Cooking

 I am putting in 10-12 hour days of cooking.  It's that time of year.  I had a request for salt rise bread for Thanksgiving.  And though I will be making all kinds of rolls and breads, this was added to my agenda.  As I have shown you, salt rise bread is a very tricky bread to make and takes 2 days and a lot of attention.  This was my second rise and the raisin' was looking more than perfect.  It was happy and bubbling away.  Usually, if salt rise is a failure, you would never see it acting like this.  In other words, it would have failed already.

 So, being proud of my bread at this point, I took it to the next stage.

 I kneaded and kneaded.

 I finally had the perfect silky smooth dough, placed it in pans and thought I was done.

The one on the front left is a loaf from that batch.  Winnie, who loves salt rise bread, wouldn't eat it.  I was very disappointed but I jumped right back in the saddle and a day later, turned out these other 3 loaves.  Perfect salt rise! The failure occurred on the day I had no heat. I think I killed the dough when I put it in the cold loaf pans.  Not only is it about 1 inch high, it was as thick as a brick.  I had to throw all 3 loaves out.  But the perfect ones are now frozen and will make their next  appearance on the Thanksgiving table.  I'll make this 3 more times before the big day so people can take loaves home with them.

Eight quarts of turkey gravy is made and frozen. 



And yesterday my daughter and I made 130 more pierogies.  I'm gaining on it!

Comments

Leanna said…
My Goddess!! Don't forget to get a little sleep. I can almost taste some of this. So far it looks amazing. I was able to get in some more cookie mixes and get them wrapped into cookie logs. I have 16 now. I also got my orange poppy seed bread, unbaked, into food saver bags and they are in the freezer. I'm so glad I got that thing.
It's encouraging to know that even an expert baker like you can have a failure! The successful loaves look de-lish, of course.
Christer. said…
You know it is bad if the dog who loves it won't eat it :-) :-)

Have a great day!

Christer.
Rain said…
Oh Joyce! Thanks for the visual, that's too bad about the first batch of bread, but now you know!
Guillaume said…
Wow! Preparing Thanksgiving is serious business for you.
Kay said…
Oh yum! This all looks so amazing!
Too bad. At least you knew what happened. And, the dog would not eat it? It must have been bad. I could no longer cook for that long and especially over many days. It sounds like T dinner is moving right along I make my gravy before the big day.
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