A few days ago I decided to bake bread in a #10 can similar to this recipe I found here a while back. Why? Because somebody said it’s possible! Otherwise, there’s no good reason to do so and, after my experience, a waste of time and ingredients if you ask me.
The thing I noticed, however, was that the two recipes never called for using a #10 can but used large tomato juice type cans. No big deal, I figured, I would try anyway.
So, I choose to bake a single loaf following a recipe I’ve used before with success to see what happens….
I won’t bore you with a bunch of details.Suffice it to say that I mixed the dry ingredients as stated, added the liquids, mixed, let rise in an oiled bowl (covered with a damp towel) for an hour and everything was looking good:
What you see above is the bread having about doubled in size after about an hour which is what you want to see. I figured, good news and decided to move on. I then beat the bread down a bit and shoved/molded inside a #10 can after having oiled the inside as best as I could:
As you can see, after having degassed the bread it didn’t take up much more than maybe a quarter to at most a third of the can. The recipe I followed is different than most in that it uses a small bit of oven heat (at about 100-105 degrees) to get the yeast to rise the bread. You let it sit in a warm oven for about an hour or more, if needed. This is what it looks like after an hour:
The above photo shows the bread more than doubled in size which is great news and exactly what I was expecting. So, I closed the oven up and turned it on to 325 (what the recipe calls for) and let it cook for 30-35 minutes. For some reason that’s when everything fell apart… literally. The middle of bread sunk in which tends to leave a sinking feeling in my stomach as well:
As you can see from the above two photos, the bread has shrunk considerably! That was a bummer. Things only got worse when I took the bread out and cut it:
The bread essentially crumbled, the middle was about nonexistent, and the outsides were still a bit gooey (I assume from oiling the inside of the can) but it looked pretty good when I first brought the bread out of the oven.
Anyway, maybe I didn’t let it cook quite long enough or maybe hot enough but, like I said, it worked just fine in a normal bread pan. I might try this again in smaller tomato/soup cans or even in a mason jar but I’m not sure yet.
So, have you ever tried this? I’d be grateful to hear your experiences and suggestions!
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