Seedy Bread

You know those recipes you find that are healthy, claim amazing taste, and promote how easy it is to make it? The ones that make you think that eating healthy will be so much easier now that this pin is in your life? I know those pins. Many of you know those pins. Well, recently we had a GREAT submission from a faithful reader in Germany that revolves around one of "those pins"! Here is Lida's story: 

For quite a while I’m reading your posts from over here in Berlin and enjoying them! Now I can’t help it and make a submission on my own, freshly failed in my kitchen. What I tried to make was this: 

http://food52.com/recipes/28886-my-new-roots-life-changing-loaf-of-bread

A super healthy life changing loaf! Uhm, okay, in my dreams. What I actually made was this: 

Originally I had in mind to make black bread. However, I couldn't find any recipe NOT using long fermented sourdough starters. I'm afraid of sourdough, the longer it needs to ferment the more, despite reading lots of posts with titles like "No Fear of Sourdough!".

Then I hit upon this. One of the family members my baking attempts are usually aimed at had recently remarked that he loved seed and nut breads –"the seedier and more nutty the better". What could be seedier and more nutty than a 100%-seeds-&-nut-loaf? Only the experience of baking it – or trying to.

I took a standard loaf pan (of tin instead of silicon but I boldly claim that can't be the reason for the disaster), lined it with parchment and filled in the seed mix. It consisted of the exact same amounts of the exact same ingredients. I did not substitute anything with some unfathomable EU-products and did not mix up metric and US measures. Note, I even got a measuring cup with cups and ounces (okay, I already had the cup but anyway, I did use it) and even bought organic coconut oil for 5 Euros to add those darn 3 tablespoons to the batter! Said batter actually isn't worthy of the name, because it's simply a drippy mix of nuts and seeds, sticky as heck because of the class A maple syrup that goes in it. At that point I didn't worry. After all, the whole mix had to sit for a couple of hours or overnight. I imagined the seeds would swell up and somehow be pressed into a solid shape.

The next day I got the first hunch that this wasn't the case. Since I had gone so far there was no turning back. The tin went in the preheated oven and sat there for a good 30 minutes instead of the 20 minutes called for in the recipe, but the cluster was still falling apart. It was sticky, but far from manageable. How far became evident as I transferred it out of the baking tin by lifting the parchment. The outer crust was inseparably glued to the parchment while inside this package everything was rolling (think of holding a water bomb filled with seeds and nuts). Incredibly, I succeeded in turning it onto another sheet of parchment on the oven rack. It went in the oven again, and I was pretty glad to have the approaching failure out of sight. It got back to me. Soon there was a burnt smell in the kitchen. It came partly from the parchment which had caught fire, and partly from nuts and seeds that had fallen off and rolled in the oven's most remote corners. Probably it will be years until the last of these has been removed or burned to ashes. Attempts to separate the burnt parchment from the loaf resulted in the collapse of the loaf itself and the whole baking project. This final stage of decomposition is documented by the photos.

On the GCT scale: this gets a 4. Visibly burnt, but not on fire (yet). No one tried the stuff smelling of burnt coconut oil and burnt money. No one will ever try it again. At least not over here in this tiny kitchen of ours.