Causa’s exploding bread

See that rupture? That’s right, the bread exploded. Or, in engineer’s term, it rose fast enough to break the surface tension.

I had been investigating the reason why my bread never matched the fluffiness and cheweness of mass produced bread. Before it was turned into a production line, some brilliant baker must’ve figured out how to do it by hand first. So, being me, I set out to experiment the techniques invovled.

At first, I had thought that it is the amount of bubbles and how large they are that matters, as is evident in the foccacia bread from my local Loblaws. Then it occured to me that the bubbles were constrained from expanding due to the hardened outer shell during baking. So I set out to eliminate that obstacle first, as well as trying some exotic ingredients in the underlying material used.

A combination of complex methods resulted in the picture you see above. The bubbles expanded so much that they broke through the dough and created that fissure. The bread itself is chewy and soft, but still not as soft as I would’ve liked.

For this one, I made the mistake of taking it out as is. Because once I did that, the air bubbles within the bread cooled and have the consequence of shrinking the bread’s volume. I will make sure to bake it for a bit longer to harden and solidify its shape next time while also switch to whole grain flour to see if I can reproduce the result.