My little microbes were all dead!!

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

-Albert Einstein

This is the part where everyone pats themselves on the back and goes home, except I did get different results!

I had to ask myself the question of why my bread was getting so bad when I was doing the same thing and not getting reasonable results.

The loafs were getting smaller and smaller over the span of two weeks. I thought to myself that maybe I was going nuts. Or I had the water temperature wrong. Or... Something?!?!?

I ended up testing the yeast and it was dead as a doornail. I ran out and bought new yeast and...

I got a loaf about the same size as my under performing loaf from before. It was 4cm from the top. But that was a far cry from the "basically flat" loaf that I had made the night before.

So, just for Shiggles (shits/giggles) I decided to make a loaf with 8 grams of yeast, but keep everything else the same. And I got a result, and whattaresult!

Recipe:

Water: 220.0 grams @ 27'C
Bread Flour: 330.0 grams
Butter: 25.00
Sugar: 15.0 grams
Salt: 7.61 grams
Yeast: 8 grams <- Up from 3.65

WOAH NELLY!

THAT'S A RESULT

That is a seriously puffy lady!

So what happened?

Well, from what I can gather, I had two problems:

1. I wasn't using enough yeast.
2. My yeast died extremely quickly.

My recipe was exactly the same as the previous one, with the exception of the amount of yeast, which was 8 grams.

So, why did my first couple loafs do so well for height? (2cm from top)

I got a good result with fairly hot water, and I'm thinking I may try that again, once I've replicated my monster loaf. I'm going to do the 37.5' water and see if that makes this work better (with the original 3.65 grams of yeast)

I'll keep you posted!