Day 22

This is the Last Day guys.  So the night before ( Day 21), I made this lump of doughy looking thing —————————–>

It looks a lot more dry than all the mixtures so far, that might be because of the enlarged proportions but I don’t know. The mix definitely smells like bread now, much more than it did in the beginning, and oh do I remember how it smelled like in the beginning. But my bread is clearly trying very hard to please me, because not only does it smell more acceptable, it has turned into a fluffy bundle of fun. It was so spongy when I was mixing!

So the next morning, it was time for the float test. The float test requires testing a half teaspoon of the mixture( now known as the leaven of the bread), to see whether it floats or sink. If it floats, then the microbes are doing their job and there are plenty of gas bubbles trapped inside the leaven, helping the mixture rise and bubble. However, if it is too dense, then the mixture will sink. So I decided to check my bread at 8:30 (ish) AM, and did the float test, but it wasn’t floating. So I waited two more hours and at 10 AM it still wasn’t floating. So then it came to be 12 PM and I sat there for a good twenty minutes trying to figure out why the bread wasn’t floating. I realized that I was manipulating it too much,I was using my finger to scrape the mix from the spoon and packing the mixture as I put it into the water, but once I allowed the mixture to come off the spoon while swishing it within the water, it floated like a charm! ( I know it looks gross, but I am very proud of that floating bit of leaven).

So I totally.. messed up the bread forming. It was a nice beautiful ball, and then I thought I was suppose to stretch from right to left, but I did it four times from right to left instead of four times total, so I thought I had totally butchered the bread, and it looked more like a cauliflower when I finished folding. However, the bread in it’s final form came out beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. Stayed up till 1 in the morning to finish baking, but LOOK AT IT! It’s the most beautiful thing I have ever baked.

Overall the bread making experience was eye-opening and fun! It was a very interesting experience to realize that we’ve been eating microbes from other people for so long, and now I can make my own!

 

Featured image:

http://weheartit.com/entry/339900