A Happy Mistake

One of the lovely things about cooking is that mistakes can lead us down an entirely new road of good things to eat. Sometimes they can even be better than what we intended to make.

A while ago, I mentioned wanting to make no-knead bread, and was sent a link to this page ~ http://steamykitchen.com/168-no-knead-bread-revisited.html~ from a dear friend. I made it once, loved it, and determined to make it repeatedly. Then it was Christmas and my baking skills were consumed with stollen and…well, basically stollen.

In January I decided to make the no-knead bread again, this time from memory as the ingredients are so simple. The bread didn’t turn out the same, though. It was a different texture, chewy and more moist with a less impressive crust than the original loaf had. It was still good, so I made it a few more times before I checked the original recipe and discovered that while I had the ingredients down, I wasn’t making the oven hot enough, and I wasn’t heating the cooking pot before dumping the dough in it to be baked. Ah, problem solved.

In the meantime, though, while eating a slice of the “mistake” bread, I was reminded of a coconut, white chocolate loaf that a bakery in one of our local grocery stores used to make. It had the same texture as the “mistake” loaves that I was making, and so one night while mixing the flour, salt, yeast and water, I added a cup of shredded coconut and half a cup of white chocolate chips to the batter. I baked it the way I had been doing it, in a 350 F oven. It was delicious.

Moist, coconutty, with just the right amount of sweetness from the white chocolate. It was especially good toasted with butter. It was a success.

So, now that I have discovered the error of my ways, my future loaves of no-knead bread will look more like those lovely, rich brown loaves on the recipe page. I’m going to make 2 loaves tonight, (one, plain no-knead and one coconut, white chocolate) and bake them tomorrow, so I will have pictures then.

In the meantime, the lesson is that sometimes mistakes can take you down a road that you never thought you’d find yourself on. I’m pretty sure that’s how snails came to be on the menu…