Unexpected Surprise

So I was prepping some pockets tonight to be baked in the morning for my basic cataloging class (last day of class) and had quite a bit of leftover garlic yeast dough when I finished making the little pockets. A blog on that later when they finally get baked. Since I had quite a bit of dough left, I figure I try and bake it by itself and see if I get some reasonably good bread to dip into the marinara sauce I was going to be having for dinner. I had challah on the mind (there’s a good reason for this, maybe I’ll get to that story one day) so without really thinking about it I made the dough into a challah shape:

This is the unbaked form, after its been resting for about 20 to 30 minutes. I wasn’t really thinking logically when I made the shape. Had I really thought about it, I would’ve made it fatter rather than thin. That way I would’ve had a roll of bread… instead of a breadstick. Anyways, preheated the oven to 375 degrees and put an egg wash over the dough and sprinkled some kosher salt on top. I remember yacko mentioning that the pumpkin pockets in an earlier post needing some salt on top to flavor the dough a little more. Stuck it in the oven and 20 minutes later I got this:

I was worried the kosher salt would melt in the egg wash, when I was sprinkling it on, they were disappearing a bit but then this came out:

The darker little spots are the garlic.

Now, the outside came out well… how did the inside look? I broke a section off and it was better than I expected. Yeasty, soft, warm, and chewy.

I think I’m going to try and bake my bread outside of the bread machine from now on and see what happens. Use the machine for the dough cycle until I work up the courage and find the time to do it by hand. I don’t like the texture of the bread machine bread, I was hoping for this consistency when I first got the machine. So we’ll see what happens now. This dough did get worked a little as I was rolling it out and cutting circles out of it so the gluten developed quite a bit.