"Rescued" sour cream bread "救助”されたサワークリームパン

Due to the shortage of yeast during the Covid-19 pandemic, my wife has been relying on biga/poolish as the leavening agent for bread. She has experimented with substituting preferments in various of her favorite bread recipes with great success. So she decided to try making sour cream bread based on a recipe in "Beard on Bread" using biga. She made the biga the night before and by morning it had puffed up nicely. She used it to make the dough; making adjustments for the moisture and flour already in the biga. She made the dough in the morning but by 5:00 PM basically nothing had happened. The dough sat sullenly in the bottom of the bowl just basically where it had been in the morning. We consulted each other about what to do with the recalcitrant dough. Should we give it a time out by just putting it into the fridge and letting it spend the night getting its act together and hopefully rising? Then I suggested, "Maybe we should just cook it now like a focaccia". That sounded like a plan to us so I rolled it out on parchment paper. (This is a new technique I read about recently for getting these types of bread in and out of the oven and found it works very well). We decided to top it with cream cheese and black olives.

This is the loaf after it was cooked. It had some rise, at least it wasn't flat like a cracker.

Ingredients:
Biga:
1 3/4 cups flour
2 cups sour cream
1/8 tsp yeast

Dough:
biga
3 tbs. sugar
2 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. baking soda
3 to 4 1/2 cups flour

Directions:

The night before baking mix together the biga, cover it with towels and leave at room temperature overnight. Next day in an electric mixer with a dough hook combine the biga, sugar, salt, baking soda and flour into the smooth elastic dough. Knead on the dough hook for 7 to 10 minutes. Remove from the bowl and hand knead a few minutes more. Put into the bowel and lightly coat with oil. Let rise.

In this case it did not rise. After some consternation and discussion it was decided the bread had been re-designated as focaccia and I stepped up to "center stage". I  took the dough out of the bowl in which it had spent the day and transferred it to a piece of parchment paper (big enough to hold the final rectangle). I stretched the dough into a rectangle shape, then folded all sides inward and stretched it again to make the same sized rectangle. I repeated this 2 times and ended up with the focaccia shape shown above. I covered it with plastic wrap and a towel and let it rise (hopefully) for another hour. Meanwhile I preheated the oven with a baking stone in it to 390 F. After one hour, I pressed the dough with my finger tips like I would do with focaccia bread. I brushed the surface with olive oil. At my wife's suggestion, I put small cubes of cream cheese and slices of black olives on top of the loaf. I transferred it still on the parchment paper using a metal pizza paddle to the baking stone and baked it for 30 minutes.

Surprisingly this bread was very good! The texture was dense and chewy but soft at the same time. The basic recipe was slightly sweet with a slight tang from the sour cream. Those flavors came through and went extremely well with the saltiness of the olives and the creaminess of the cream cheese. This turned out to be a very good breakfast bread that went well with coffee. It is a prime example of how "forgiving" yeast breads can be. We have taken to calling it "rescued" bread.  We wouldn't mind making it again but we are not sure we could reproduce the "mistake" that resulted in this version of the bread rather than the one we were expecting. We think maybe the ratio of biga to flour was not correct and most of the gluten was eaten by the resulting yeast so the bread couldn't rise. (Just a theory. Who knows? We'll be working on this.)