A couple words of recently accrued wisdom regarding the bread recipe from the last post.

So. Apparently when the authors of ‘Artisan Bread in Five Minutes’ caution you against putting the lid on your dough bucket tightly they mean it. I kind of ignored that because I’m having a current battle royale against the fruit flies that are threatening my sanity. Those nasty little buggies fly around all my food at all stages of preparation and I figured if I packed that lid on tight it would keep the creepies out. It would appear now that it was a less than well thought out idea.

I would take a picture of what happened, but the only concrete result was temporary ringing in the ears and mild hearing loss when the lid EXPLODED off the top of the bucket. When I say it exploded, I mean it. Kind of like this…

BANG went the lid. Rattle went my eyeballs. Crash went the glass. And the dough? It just stayed put.

 

My kids came flying into the kitchen from outdoors yelling, “MOM! WHAT was THAT?”

The percussive power of that bang was enough to knock over a glass sitting near it. This glass, mercifully, did not break. I am hoping that means there will be no more glass breakage around here for a while. It was really funny, because no one was hurt and nothing was broken, but it was clear that it actually could’ve done damage to someone or something if the circumstances had been different. So PLEASE do not put the lid tightly on your dough buckets, people!

…Now, aside from the sheer excitement of things literally exploding in my kitchen, there was something else really interesting in all this. When the explosion occured, the only thing flying out of the bucket was gas. The dough sank back into the bucket like you fall into bed after a long day. It was crazy. Logical, upon reflection, but at the time it seemed counterintuitive. Don’t get me wrong. I was happy not to be cleaning slack dough from all my kitchen surfaces. Queen Nerd (that’d be me) just found it fascinating. Can my nerd peeps back me up on this?