It had to happen sooner or later. I'm surprised I made it this far without any major culinary disasters. In general the Sun Oven is very forgiving. It's practically impossible to overcook or burn anything, but it can't compensate for a bad recipe or not following one properly. I don't know why I chose this recipe. We were out of bread and I wanted to try something new. In retrospect I should have stuck with my trusted
100% whole wheat bread recipe. I'm not sure what I did wrong. When I noticed that the loaves were not rising I checked the troubleshooting chapter of my
cookbook. Among the possible causes were:
1. Too much yeast. The recipe called for 1 1/2 tsp. I used a whole packet.
2. Too much water. The dough seemed a little dry so I added a tiny bit during the kneading cycle.
The bread came out dense with an overall unpleasant crumbly texture. The flavor was similar to cornbread. I don't really like cornbread. At least I used up all the cornmeal I had in the pantry so I won't make the mistake of trying this bread recipe again any time soon.
As for the Sun Oven, it did it's job perfectly maintaining a temperature of 350ยบ turning out two nicely browned loaves in forty-five minutes.
Had to laugh at this one, but only in sympathy. This pretty much sums up about 1 out of 5 of my experiences with a regular oven. Although you say you won't try that one again, I hope you might try a different kind of corn bread recipe in future, because I love corn bread and would love to hear about a success. I'm still gathering inspiration from you to maybe try this myself someday... maybe.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comment. I will definitely make some corn bread in the near future. Not so much because I like it, I'm not a big fan, but I own about 30 cast iron corn bread pans of various shapes. I almost never use them but keep buying them at yard sales and thrift stores.
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