bread-baking fail

Last night I surprised Israel with a bread-baking lesson.
I thought it would be a good surprise, because he's been wanting to learn to bake bread, and because living sustainably is important to him. But he thought that my surprise would be his friend Tracie coming to visit. Bread is not as funny as Tracie. So the bread-baking energies were off a little to begin with.

When we added the yeast to the warm water, it didn't bubble like it should. My yeast was probably a year or so old; I don't know how much that matters. I was suspicious from the beginning that the little yeasties weren't doing their job. (Plus, my oven truly sucks, so I knew we'd be crippled.)

While we kneaded, we watched a TED Talk with Peter Reinhart about the art of bread baking. (That's what Israel is looking so enthralled about.)

The dough didn't rise. Damn. We decided that it didn't hurt anything to bake it anyway, and we'd just eat really dense, brick-like bread.

But we didn't count on it being so dense and brick-like that it wouldn't even bake all the way through. The loaves are small and heavy. Like holding a baby. And they are definitely not anything you want to eat.

I'm going to try again and see if I can't get things working more smoothly before we have another bread lesson. Next time I'll just have Tracie come for a visit. I'm sure that would turn out much better.