March 17, 2015 - 7:37am
What to do when one has has accidentally left out an ingredient
I've yet (touch wood) to leave out the salt by mistake so I can't have been baking long enough! I recently discovered I'd omitted the barley syrup from my Danish rye bread dough just as it was going into the oven. Would the dough have survived me scooping it out of the pans, mixing in the syrup and letting it proof again? I did not think so but now I wonder..
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My guess would be "not very well", but it would also depend on how long it had already fermented, how heavily leavened it was, etc.
There are plenty of unsweetened rye breads, so I'd be inlined to just bake it and call it something else rather than a Danish rye.
I've left salt out until late in bulk fermentation then kneaded it in. My recollection is that it didn't come out great but it was still edible.
I'll second Floyd's thoughts. Rye paste is fragile enough that it won't tolerate a remix at that point in the fermentation. Let me put that a bit differently: yes, you could have mixed in the malt syrup at that point but you would have shifted an already dense bread closer to neutron star density.
Mise en place, mise en place, mise en place...
Paul
if you Know that you have forgotten the salt , then i would suggest that you use that mistake as a pate fermente set it aside, even freeze it and add some to your next dough, up to 25% addition would be ok but add the proportion of salt for the amount of pate fermente.
If we detected a dough that wasn't quite right we would set it aside and add a small amounts to subsequent doughs through a nights production, this saved any loss which pleased the boss and saved us having to try to get rid of a lot of useless bread.
Its a good idea to taste a dough that has salt and one that doesn't, it can be quite usefull in saving a complete loss.
kind regards Derek
..with the taste of the result, that is. But maybe I did detect some difference since I've never left it out in subsequent bakes of the same recipe. Bread baking, for me at least, is a series of mistakes learned from, so I'd be inclined to try the remix once, despite what's been said here cautioning against. What's it cost ya? I imagine that, were it not to rise, you could add more starter and flour, ending up with more bread than you'd originally planned for. You could then give it away to some lucky person. Who doesn't like virtually any of your fresh homemade breads (even the mistakes)?
Several of my early attempts at bread making resulted in me realizing very late that I had left out the salt.
I had read that salt would retard the yeast so I always did my best to mix it in after an autolyse and it seemed like I kept forgetting to put it in later on. On several occasions I caught it after a bulk ferment and rekneaded it in. It was fairly flat tasting. The flavors were there, it just didn't have that richness you'd expect. Another time I didn't realize it until we were sitting around the dinner table wondering what was wrong with it. I kept thinking the butter we were spreading on it was off for some reason until I remembered I left the salt out. It was edible, just kinda bland. Hey, the Tuscans purposely make their bread without salt, so it's not the end of the world.
I think it is Florence, Italy, where there is salt-less bread. I believe I read somewhere that a tax on salt and a stubborn set of bakers refused to give in. Really, though, the best baked good I had there was a cookie made with at least one stick worth of butter.
If you leave something out and remember right away, you're alright. Otherwise, bake and taste. See how the bread comes out. You might be surprised, perhaps, but maybe not, in a good way.