The "Oh Shit!" Chef

I was feeling festive today, and decided to try this new bread recipe for my instapot (Sidenote: This article is just a chronicle of my kitchen adventures, but if you want the recipe, it's Here. All kudos to Silvia, she runs a lovely cooking blog)

I am not, by habit, a baker. I LOVE to cook. Baking is a cooking skills specialization I have never leveled up to. BUT, I'm feeling adventurous, so here we go!

I pull up the recipe. This bread is BEAUTIFUL. It's “artisan,' which makes it sound fancy, but is the kind of bread that makes you think of hobbits, or tearooms, or niche little cafes that smell like coffee and sunshine. Gorgeous pics. I dive right in.

I mix the ingredients, (I'm missing pecans, but that's just a flavor option, right? No worries) I set the yeast to activate in the water. I'm feeling great about this experience. I skim ahead while waiting on the yeast, and my eyes stick on the words “place in your dutch oven...”

… My what now? I thought this was an instapot recipe?

Why yes, it IS an instapot recipe; you use the instapot to rise the dough. Before putting it in a dutch oven. And placing in the oven-oven.

Well shit.

I don't own a dutch oven. You're lucky I own an instapot, let's be real. Okay, not to panic. I call my mother. I hunt through my cupboards, I find I have bread pans and normal cooking/baking pans. I can work with this.

I look back at the recipe; the pan needs to have a lid of some kind.

Double Shit.

“That's fine,” says Mom, “Put a double layer of tinfoil on top.”

I have tin foil! I can make this work. It's fine. Everything's fine.

By now my yeast is happy and fuzzy and ready to mix. I pour it into the dry stuff, I mix it all up.

The consistency is BEAUTIFUL. I know enough about bread making to know when it's working right, and this stuff is pristine!

Okay, I grease my instapot, I plop the dough inside as a nice, lumpy ball. I check the recipe again.

“Set on yogurt.”

My insta doesn't have a “yogurt” setting. BUT, I've made yogurt before, and I just need to put it on Keep Warm. It'll be great. No problems at all. I walk away and leave it to do it's thing.

Two Hours Later...

So, the recipe said to leave the dough to rise for 4 hours, but I really wanted it for dinner tonight. I peek in the instapot, and it has definitely gotten fluffier; It seems to have a good consistency. So I decide to call it good, and start preheating the oven. I get my pan. I turn the Instapot over to dump out the dough.

The dough thumps down. I move the pot away. And I find that my dough is half baked through from sitting in the instapot, on the 'Keep Warm' setting.

Sigh...

The good new is, the bread turned out quite good, completely in spite of myself. I stuffed it in the oven anyway, to finish baking. It didn't turn out near as pretty as the pictures; it was a little flat (it didn't fluff and round itself since it was, yaknow, half-baked already), but the flavor was great and the texture was adequate, and after I sliced it, it ended up looking kind of like biscotti!

All in all, a great recipe, but a far more exciting adventure than I had intended. I'm gonna go back to things I actually know how to make now...