Boomerang Bread

So last night I baked bread. And for breakfast this morning I had toasted...

wait for it…

...Wonder Bread. Hubby has dubbed last night's creation "Boomerang Bread" I just call it terrible. So here is what not to do when baking bread.

Sunday night I took some old dough and decided I would start feeding it, a poolish but sort of a sourdough starter. By Tuesday morning I had fed it 3 times. It was smelling rather pleasantly sourdoughish. I put it in the fridge to stop any further fermenting and left it there while I was at work. That evening I took the starter out of the refrigerator and after letting it warm up a bit on the counter I mixed my final dough. The starter plus ½ tsp yeast, 2 tsp salt, ¾ cup warm water and 3 cups all-purpose flour. I let it rise on the counter for 2 hours before covering and letting rest in the refrigerator overnight. In the morning I took it out of the refrigerator and plopped it into a larger bowl. Here it is important to note that I did not knead the bread or fold it over or anything, I think that wasn't a good thing. I was in a rush so I covered it and left it to rise on my counter while I worked.

When I came home after work the dough had risen nicely. I split it into 2 chunks then squeezed and rolled it into 2 loafs and after 45 minutes baked it. So really no kneading of this dough and not much rise time before baking. It was also a sticky wetter dough which made it hard to work with. I scored the first loaf and baked it, we were anxious to eat it so I took it out of the oven before it was really nice and brown. By the time I got ready to put in the second loaf I was trying to eat dinner which may be why I forgot to score that loaf and why, due to careless transfer to the oven, my loaf bent into sort of a boomerang shape.

See I told you it was terrible. Note that since I didn't score it, theres a blowout on the side of the loaf. And thats why you should score your bread, so it expands where you want it to and it doesn't look like crap. We gnawed on the 1^st loaf while it was still warm but in the morning when I tried to cut the boomerang loaf to toast, I couldn't get a knife through it. So embarrassing. I'm contemplating what to do next. Really I'd like some more of my 'soccer day bread'. The weekend is coming I may have to try to recreate that success.