trubleshooting my first breads, can you help?
i had followed lesson one (with a slight modification) and failed utterly though...i will tell my story and see if anyone can help. (i might as well introduce my self [1] too)
so i put the three cups flower 2 ts salt 2 ts yeast and 1 with 1/8 cups water and added a few sesame seeds and flex seeds to the mix. i think i went wrong because i put the yeast with warm water, now either it was too warm it and killed off the yeast or it was instant yeast that´s not supposed to go in water or something but nothing was happaning (we´re having very cold days but i put the mix in a heated room quite close to the heating and waited more then 2 hours and NADA... took it out and kneeded it some more put it back for a couple more hours and still nothing! so i stuck it in the fridge and decided i will try to read what to do with a mix like that the next morning.
i read somewhere here that it´d be ok to just mix more yeast... i then mixed more yeast in water again (this time less warm, thinking it was probably too warm) and waited more....
nothing! and i waited enough time... stuck it in the over none the less (managed to burn it because i had no idea how to use my gas oven!) the outcome was a tasty block of dough, not really adible but tasty (a little too much salt but other then that i liked the taste)
i concluded that the yeast i was using was too old and i probably wasn´t using it right?
or maybe for some reason the seeds were getting in the way somehow?
so the next day i bought fresh yeast and we tried again, this time i stuck to the basics, but the mix came out VERY sticky... i probably had to put more flower but i insisted it was probably ok... it grew but not doubled (in about two and a half hours! i went out of the house so this time the waiting wasn´t so bad) we came home late and i took it out to shape it for the mold but had to add some flower because it was too sticky to handle, so i kneeded it some more and in the end just dumped as best i could in the mold... it didn´t so much grow as expended and because it was so late we didn´t wait too much before just sticking it in the over (about an hour) in the oven it did grow a little and it came out adible but certanly with a lot of room for improvement, it was too dense but i didn´t mind, it´s a welcomed change haha.
my conclusion is too much water impeding the expansion?
any help would be greatly welcome,
thanks in advance,
Simisu