Free Web NovelChapter 355: ‘Princess’
Most of the progress towards perfect Redwood Style Bread was achieved through dedicated effort and a rigorous experimental process, but as with everything in life, some innovations were simply chanced upon by coincidence.
For the first few days of tests, Christina, Jake, Jessie, and Jenny had focused mainly on modifying their kneading techniques or on adding other ingredients to try to change the taste and texture of the bread.
Kneading longer seemed to result in a chewier, tougher texture, while kneading less led to a crumbly end result.
Adding eggs, milk, butter, spices, vinegar, honey, sugar, or some combination of these and a variety of other ingredients often resulted in interesting flavours, some of which were actually quite tasty, but none of their attempts ever managed to address the biggest issue.
The final product was comparable to the Cloud Bread from Southbridge in terms of lightness, and it certainly tasted better as it didn’t have the same bitterness to it, but the current iteration of Redwood-Style Bread was still somewhat tough and dense.
It was a big step up from regular flatbreads, and selling it as is would certainly not be an issue, but Christina wasn’t satisfied yet.
Lucas had told her that proper yeasted bread could be even softer and fluffier than sponge cake, and so far, her Senior Brother had never once lied to her...
Well, perhaps he had deceived or tricked her a few times in order to gain an advantage when they were sparring, or to escape from her wrath when she was angry...
But he had never lied to her about anything really important!
Although she didn’t know how Lucas was so certain it was possible to achieve such a miraculous result, Christina had learned to trust him when it came to these matters, so she didn’t feel like settling for what she had managed to achieve thus-far.
The princess was convinced that, somehow, Redwood Bread could have the same volume as their very first attempts, but with an even crumb instead of a bunch of big holes inside of it.
The key seemed to be in the step where they deflated the dough after letting it rise.
If they didn’t do this step, the end product inevitably had big voids in it, but if they did, it ended up much closer to flatbread.
It also didn’t seem to matter how rough they were when they deflated the dough as squishing it gently or punching it down aggressively led to the same result.
Understanding this, Christina, Tess, and the bakery siblings kept trying different things, like half-squishing the dough, or rolling the dough flat then folding it on top of itself, or even re-kneading it entirely after it had risen, all the time hoping to stumble onto an answer to this problem.
Through this process, they did discover a few interesting things, but it wasn’t until several days after they began experimenting that they achieved a real breakthrough on this issue, one that came completely by accident.
That day, Tina, Tess, and Jenny had been working in the kitchen, preparing another round of experimental dough. This round had substituted the usual lard for more expensive butter and added a bit of milk, something that they had already discovered resulted in a slightly softer, lighter texture.
The 3 girls had just punched down a big mound of risen dough, cutting and shaping it into balls to make a set of 8 buns.
For their experiments, they had mostly switched to making these kinds of buns as they cooked faster and they could perform more tests at once. It was also easier on everyone’s stomachs as they weren’t tempted to eat full loaves of bread.
The buns were arranged onto the big wooden paddle and were about to be put into the new, full-sized bread oven, when Jessie burst into the kitchen in a panic, her eyes bloodshot and her clothes covered in a thin layer of soot.
After catching her breath, the young girl explained that an accident had occurred in the barracks where the siblings had been staying, resulting in a fire spreading throughout the building.
Thankfully, the blaze had not gotten too far before being put out through the collective efforts of all the nearby refugees and soldiers, but a few people had still gotten hurt and a lot of damage had been done to the structure itself.
Jessie and her younger siblings weren’t among those seriously injured in the incident, but all of them had inhaled a fair bit of smoke while trying to escape the building.
That would have been bad enough on its own, but the more serious issue was that a lot of their belongings had been destroyed and they no longer had a place to sleep for the night.
Hearing this, Tina and Jenny immediately dropped what they were doing and ran off. Tess followed quickly after them, only pausing briefly to extinguish the oven to ensure another fire didn’t break out.
Needless to say, the buns they were about to bake were completely forgotten.
The rest of the day was incredibly hectic, filled with running around, treating the injured, and digging through burnt rubble to salvage whatever personal items could be found.
Lucas, Sasha, Eris, and Christina, as well as the local Garrison Commander were all on scene the entire time, coordinating the efforts and helping out wherever they could, only managing to restore some semblance of normality and order by the time the sun started to set.
That evening, Christina, with full cooperation from Lucas and Eris, dragged the 6 bakery siblings back to the Balfour Manor, insisting the family stay with them from now on.
Several others who were close to the Balfour Marquess’ Disciples were also brought along and moved into the large guest villa that had been assigned to Lucas, Christina, and Eris, the 3 children no longer caring about it looking like they were playing favourites.
The fire this time hadn’t been too serious, but it could just as easily have been a disaster with everyone living in the 100 person barracks being burnt to death.
Things didn’t fully calm down until after midnight, and it wasn’t until the afternoon of the next day, once their younger siblings were properly settled into their new home, that Jake, Jessie, and Jenny all accompanied Christina and Tess back to the bakery.
Tina had fully expected the dough they had prepared yesterday to have spoiled or gone flat and need to be thrown away, but upon entering the kitchen, she, along with everyone else, was stunned to discover 8 puffy unbaked buns sitting on the countertop.
Poking, prodding, and sniffing them a bit, the doughs seemed perfectly fine. Additionally, these doughs had risen to the same level they were at before being squished down, yet seemed much firmer and springier to the touch.
It seemed that even after being deflated once, as long as it was left alone for long enough, yeasted bread would just puff up again.
Christina’s first instinct seeing this was to flatten them again as she didn’t want holey bread, but upon second thought, she couldn’t help wondering if something different might happen if she baked these twice risen buns as they were.
Discussing it with the bakery siblings, they eventually decided to run a side-by-side test, gently compacting half of the buns while leaving the other half as they were.
The oven was heated, the buns were inserted, and the wait began.
25 minutes later, once the freshly baked buns were back on the counter and cooled to a temperature they could be handled at, everyone in the kitchen gathered around in anticipation.
Christina did the honours, carefully slicing into one of the experimental buns that had swelled to almost twice the size of its compacted cousins, and what she found inside brought a giant smile to her face.
Slicing up the other 3 twice-risen buns, the princess found a similar result in all of them, further improving her mood.
Then came the taste test, and it didn’t disappoint.
A light, crispy outer curst with a soft, fluffy, airy, delicious, and perfectly even crumb. It was everything Tina and her companions had been hoping to achieve.
None of them understood why giant holes would form in the bread if it was only allowed to rise once, while the crumb would become uniform if it rose twice, but that was a mystery to be explored in the future.
Right now, they had an initial process to produce what all of them considered to be ’ideal’ Redwood-Style Bread.
From that day on, a new set of experiments were run to determine the optimum time, temperature, and other conditions for the bread’s ’first rise’, and its ’second rise’.
Several days, dozens of buns, and a second custom-made oven designed specifically to facilitate their bread’s second rise later, Christina, Jake, Jenny, and Jessie were confident their product was ready for sale; all that was left to do now was to choose a name for their shop and open for business.
And so, on December 24th of year 876 of the New Era, a small bakery on a nameless street in the Rockwell Kingdom’s Misty City opened its doors to the public for the very first time.
It seemed like a rather inconsequential event in the moment, but the opening of the very first ’Princess Bakery’ would be remembered by later generations as the beginning of the grand revolution in food for the Blue Sky Continent, then the entire world of Servist, and eventually the...
