When something goes right I don’t spend enough time reflecting on why it went well. I’m too busy gobbling up the finish product. I spend much more time thinking about why a recipe went wrong. Mostly because I have nothing to eat. Some of the time is spent feeling silly for making the mistake. I am realizing that while I hate wasting ingredients, not all is wasted.
Last weekend I made delicious pretzel bread and I decided that I would really like to add more baking soda and make the pretzel bread smaller. I didn’t think through the impact of doing both of these alterations at the same time.
The result? I added so much baking soda that burned my tongue and ended up throwing away the entire recipe. What did I learn? There is such a thing as too much baking soda in boiling water. On the plus side, I discovered that If you boil the dough for a whole minute with baking soda, they puff up perfectly. After the disastrous batch, I threw away the failed bites and started over again.
The second batch was twice the size, the amount of baking soda was carefully measured. With these changes made, I couldn’t stop the bites from jumping into my mouth! It was really good for me to reflect on the mistakes I made and get to correcting them immediately.
