The Prosphora Fiasco

This post doesn't have as much to do with Elena, but not everything has to be all about her.

We signed up to bake prosphora, which is the bread that is used for Eucharist at church. It has to be made with certain ingredients (flour, water, salt, and yeast), and it has a mold for the top of the loaf, called a "seal", kind of like a butter mold.

Well, it's been like five years since we've done this, and we were a little rusty. In fact, I had never done it at all -- it was all Serena before.

So we got started after Vespers on Saturday night. The bread was needed for the next morning, and already we were starting late, hoping to have had some done earlier in the day. We started into our first couple loaves (we needed five), and discovered our yeast was dead. A quick run to the store, and we have yeast. We got a couple more doughballs rising, putting them in the little oven on the "proof" setting. That, apparently, does nothing, because the oven generated no heat whatsoever.

So after some waiting, we get some dough balls we can start thinking about baking. We preheat the oven. We press in the seals (we have two -- ours and our mother-in-law's). We throw them in and start baking them. We thought we were pretty close to done.

Well, it turns out that that oven is broken, it would seem. It never got hotter than 150 degrees in there, even though it was set to 325. Ahh! Three of the loaves fell, becoming this gooey bread-doughy mess. We had to nearly start all over.

As we're getting more loaves going, it's becoming apparent that the seals aren't taking very well, and that some of the loaves cracked right through the seal during baking. So a couple more loaves...

While waiting for those to rise, I took three of the fallen dough goo-messes and mixed them all up, spreading out the goo on a cookie sheet, to make crackers (or something like crackers) with. I baked that at one of the fallen loaves. Well, it turns out that I should have greased the pan. As I looked at the underside of this somewhat-delicious-looking concoction, I notice some little shiny bits. It stripped off the non-stick coating on the pan! And that was one of my mother-in-law's pans. Whoops. I guess we'll have to get her a new one.

We also put together another loaf just to use up the extra yeast-water we had left over. Serena made that into a braided loaf, which turned out to be the most beautiful one of them all -- the very one we couldn't bring to church!

So we cooked like ten loaves using a full ten pounds of flour, and maybe had five usable ones by the end! We'll have to give the rest to the ducks.