Add a new bread-making post

_posts/2019-05-03-making-bread.md

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+---
+layout: post
+title: "Making Bread"
+description: "...because I've got some free time now. 🍞"
+category: 
+tags: [baking]
+---
+
+Having recently started my "gardening leave" between positions, I have some more personal time available. I'm planning to stay productive, contributing to some open-source projects, but it also occurred to me that despite [talking about](https://speice.io/2018/05/hello.html) bread pics, this blog has been purely technical. Maybe I'll change the site title from "The Old Speice Guy" to "Bites and Bytes"?
+
+Either way, I'm baking a little bit again, and figured it was worth taking a quick break to focus on some lighter material. I recently learned two critically important lessons: first, the temperature of the dough when you put the yeast in makes a huge difference.
+
+Previously, when I wasn't paying attention to dough temperature:
+
+![Whole weat dough](/assets/images/2019-05-03-making-bread/whole-wheat-not-rising.jpg)
+
+Compared with what happens when I put the dough in the microwave for a defrost cycle because the water I used wasn't warm enough:
+
+![White dough](/assets/images/2019-05-03-making-bread/white-dough-rising-before-fold.jpg)
+
+I mean, just look at the bubbles!
+
+![White dough with bubbles](/assets/images/2019-05-03-making-bread/white-dough-rising-after-fold.jpg)
+
+After shaping the dough, I've got two loaves ready:
+
+![Shaped loaves](/assets/images/2019-05-03-making-bread/shaped-loaves.jpg)
+
+Now, the recipe normally calls for a Dutch Oven to bake the bread because it keeps the dough from drying out in the oven. Because I don't own a Dutch Oven, I typically put a casserole dish on the bottom rack and fill it with water so there's still some moisture in the oven. This time, I forgot to add the water and learned my second lesson: never add room-temperature water to a glass dish that's currently at 500 degrees.
+
+![Shattered glass dish](/assets/images/2019-05-03-making-bread/shattered-glass.jpg)
+
+Needless to say, trying to pull out sharp glass from an incredibly hot oven is not what I expected to be doing during my garden leave.
+
+In the end, the bread crust wasn't great, but the bread itself turned out pretty alright:
+
+![Baked bread](/assets/images/2019-05-03-making-bread/final-product.jpg)
+
+I've been writing a lot more during this break, so I'm looking forward to sharing that in the future. In the mean-time, I'm planning on making a sandwich.