Mikko's first bread

We spent 11 wonderful days in Toronto with Pia & Mike. As usual, I learnt a lot about cooking and food from Mike; from cutting up a whole pig (we did ½ a pig on an earlier visit), pizza baking and bread baking. The bread that I helped Mike to bake was so delicious that I decided to start a baker's career myself.

I got clear instructions from Mike and had already helped to bake once, so I expected no difficulties.

I don't know what went wrong. Could be that the fours used were wrong (I used what we had at home, probably all-purpose?), or yeast was dead or something in my process, perhaps too much or too little kneading. Anyway, stretching & folding the dough was very difficult as it stuck to the bowl and to hands, and the dough never rose.

After consulting with Mike, I tried to use the failed dough as autolyse and make a new pre-ferment using a new batch of yeast. Success was not much better. This time the dough rose (I used yeast from same package but different pouch), but problem of sticking to the bowl and hands remained. Perhaps the issue was with wrong flours and/or I had kneaded the dough already too much.

New pre-ferment

Even though the dough was badly stuck in the rising bowl (despite of using rice flours in the bowl), I managed to transfer it into our brand new Dutch oven. It looked quite pitiful in the oven, more like pancake dough than bread dough.

Dough before rising

Final product

Looks didn't improve much after baking. Instead of being a sphere, it continued to look pancake. Surprisingly, it was actually edible, even quite good.