The Great Baking Disaster, Time of Coronavirus Series

Yesterday my project was baking bread. I have celiac disease so I counted myself lucky to find and order a box of gluten-free bread mix with hard-to-find yeast. I carefully followed the directions, making substitutes only when necessary because of the limitation of ingredients we had on hand.

I set the loaf carefully in the oven to rise, utilizing the “proof” setting on the fanciest oven I’ve ever had. When the dough had nicely risen above the level of the pan, I pulled it out of the oven and set the temperature for baking. In the meantime, I sat and rested as I again checked Amazon to see if they might have one of the items for which I had been searching in vain.

The oven beeped to signal the correct baking temperature had been reached. So, I opened the oven door, picked up the glass pan of bread dough, and, oops, it slipped from my hands, just as I was setting it on the middle rack. The glass pan did a sideways landing. As I tried to right the pan it tipped all the way over (another “oops") and very sticky bread dough dripped from that rack onto the rest of the racks. If this had occurred on I-65, the guy in the traffic copter would have called it a rollover accident with probable fatalities. I must have said something, (probably not “oops”) as my spouse, god love him, came running.

If I’d had my wits about me, I would have taken a photo or just sat down and cried. Instead, using spatulas, knives, pot holders, and our hands, we both tried to scoop the dough back into the pan. In doing so we only made the mess worse. I felt like I was in an old Woody Allen film, back when they were slapstick funny. We had spread the sticky dough everywhere, including on the oven door, between the oven door and the frame, and the floor.

We wiped the mess as best we could and I looked at the dough we had managed to recover and put back in the pan. It was a lot less dough and the top of the dough was covered with little black specks of burnt-on food picked up from its adventure on the oven shelves and door. You clean-food people will be happy to know we tossed the dough that had landed on the floor or outside the oven.

If you truthfully are repelled by a little dirt, do not read the rest of this post--REALLY! STOP READING NOW!--because I scraped some of the black spots out of the dough, smoothed the top, and put it back in the oven.

By dinner time the smell of fresh-baked bread filled our kitchen. I carefully took the bread pan from the oven and, after letting it rest, removed the loaf from the pan.

The great baking disaster ended well. We each enjoyed a slice of the bread with a little butter, proclaiming the taste excellent. No apparent traces of oven debris were found in the loaf—at least so far as we could tell. Maybe it’s helpful our old eyes don’t see as well as they once did. We also concluded, with some scientific-sounding pronouncements, whatever bits of previously burnt food that might remain no doubt were safe to eat after baking.

Belatedly, I realized my error that had caused the calamity. Following the bread-making directions, I had spread butter on the top of the dough as it proofed in the oven. But I had not covered the bread. When the dough rose, the butter had melted and apparently dripped down the outside of the pan making the glass pan slippery.

There were many beneficial outcomes from the great baking disaster. In addition to having fresh bread for dinner, giving the kitchen floor an extra cleaning, needing to wash all the towels, pot-holders and the like that had become bread-dough encrusted, I also learned a lesson of what not to do when baking bread. And perhaps most significant, I don’t have to worry about my next project: reading the manual for cleaning the oven.

Happy fun in the kitchen to all of you.