Almost Dead preferement Lehmann dough ball made into bread 5/14/2011 :)

I know I try the craziest stuff sometimes, but when I went to market Friday, to make my poolish for the preferment Lehmann dough and also do some cleaning, I found a leftover dough ball that must have been pushed back in my pizza prep refrigerator, from Tuesday. The dough ball really smelled like alcohol. I always turn the pizza prep refrigerator off before I go home from market to save on the electric bill.  I also always open the door on the bottom and the lid on top of the pizza prep refrigerator so it doesn’t get moldy.  When I went to clean in the inside of the bottom of the fridge, I found this sad looking dough ball.  It looked like it had really overfermented.  At first, I was going to throw it out, but thought I would do an experiment on it.

I opened the plastic bag and put some IDY on the flattened dough ball, then did reballing with a little flour.  I then took the dough ball along into Lancaster.  It sat out for about 2 hrs.  I then reballed again after I returned home with a little more flour.  Saturday morning, I did another reball, and the dough looked like it was okay. I floured the outside of the dough ball.  After I finished making another pizza Saturday, I thought I might as well use this dough ball and see if it could be baked into bread. I don’t have any useful things to score bread with so I just used a little Exacto knife.  I also got my steam cleaner out to try and steam the dough.  I don’t have any regular bread making equipment, but just used a Pyrex mixing bowl to place over the dough on the heated pizza stone.  I lifted the glass Pyrex bowl about 5 times and really steamed the dough ball.  That was about in a 15 minute time frame.  I then let the dough ball keep baking on the pizza stone, until the middle of the bread measured about 210 degrees F on my thermometer.  I was surprised that the old sad looking overfermented preferment Lehmann dough ball did turn into bread. What really surprised me is how good this bread tasted and there wasn’t even any sour taste in the bread.

Norma