Cristopso...No Wait

I bet you all are breathlessly sitting on the edge of your seats waiting for me to tell you how my bread turned out. Ahhhh, it's so nice that you guys care about me and my kitchen adventures so much. I really appreciate it. I feel loved. You guys are the best!

Well, as with the first time you make any recipe, especially bread, there were many mistakes. Like I forgot to buy the dried fruit and nuts that make this bread Cristopsomos and not just plain Greek celebration bread. So...it's just plain ole Greek celebration bread. The other thing that I forgot was bread flour. I think this was a biggie. Since I only had all-purpose flour, my kneading time was doubled from 10 minutes to 20 minutes. It didn't help that I did have to stop several times and help Ella with the names of the phases of the moon.

My poolish - I dig that word...poolish; doesn't it sound so funny. It makes me giggle - looked like this after it had fermented for about 4.5 hours. I left it in the fridge over night and it looked like sticky snot the next morning. Interesting stuff this poolish.

Here's my bread. It flattened out some and I think that's because 1) my boule wasn't tight enough and, 2) I put those silly...dough decorations on it. I should have left them off.

I had to knead into the dough at least one cup of flour beyond what was called for in the recipe. It was very sticky; un-kneadable. For this reason, my bread was dry. Tasty, but dry. It would have been better with the fruit and nuts in it and the glaze was just downright crazy. It made the top of the bread so sticky that you could hardly handle it. I wouldn't do a glaze next time. Since it was so dry, I cut it in half and froze one half and made some T-A-S-T-Y French toast with the other half. Yummy.

I'll definitely be giving this recipe a try again.