Its currently 1:52am right now and I'm entering a blog entry about a bread I made yesterday. How weird. I mean I don't usually blog this late but I guess somedays you just have that feeling to pour out your thoughts. Anyways, its been almost a year since I touched bread dough because I always had to sacrifice my sleep to keep an eye on the proofing. Oh, how naive. Prior to this baking session, I did more intense research about bread dough and their specifics so that I can control my dough better and plan my time out. Yes, baking bread requires you to manage your time if you want to make full use of the proofing time. I was also more motivated to bake during the weekends once I started work, I wanted to be more productive as possible. So I began baking at 2pm on Sunday and did the measurements like how I always baked my cake and mix them up. I did panicked when the dough became super gooey when I added in butter but it was nothing, everything turned out fine once I kept on kneading.
Okay, this session also made me understand more on how kneading increases the gluten content in the flour as our kneading stretches the gluten found in dough (if I'm not wrong heh). When it comes to kneading, I literally use my whole body weight to knead for the fullest potential and I was drenched from sweating lol. I checked on the dough to see if its ready during kneading intervals — a "window pane" test, whereby the dough is almost translucent when slowly stretched. If it breaks right away, I would have to knead another 10mins (and I think it happened almost 10000 times, jk).
- proofing time -
Everything was alright until the folding in of red beans and white chocolate part. I was suppose to roll out the dough to a 10cm X 27 Cm and place a tbsp of red bean and white chocolate. Guess what? The red bean I bought was to mushy and watery that it caused the first dough to be soggy and messy that it turned into a scone like shape lmao (I gave up). I learnt my lesson and allow the water to drain off from the red bean and then placed it as said for the second dough.
It worked, kinda.
It didn't turned out super perfect or anything but I can say it was hard work. When I ate the slices of bread the next morning, it was pretty good tho. It has the subtle matcha flavour paired with the sweet red beans and white chocolate. Perfect (for a first try heh).
I would say that I don't usually share my baking mistakes here. However, as of 2018, I should embrace them and learn a thing or two from those failures. A new start maybe?
