Dementia is coming?

Bread batch No.644 ran into trouble earlier in the week.

The dough weighed in normally at nearly six pounds. The first knead, first rise, second knead and second rise were all normal, with the dough finishing just about level with the rims of the two tins, which is presently where it is thought that it should be on entry to the oven. The more rise the merrier is no longer the tune I bake to and too much rise is now considered to be a bad thing, likely to result in large unsightly bubbles or, worse still, total collapse. Into the oven, pre-heated to 200°C.

45 minutes later, nothing much seemed to have happened, beyond a crust starting to form over the collapsed dough. I then noticed that the oven had been turned off, and thinking that I had nothing much to lose, turned it back on, and left the loaves for another 50 minutes, the extra 5 minutes being allowance for the oven coming back to heat. Had the brain wobbled and got me to turn the oven off when I put the loaves in?

45 minutes later, nothing much seemed to have happened. At this point I started to think that maybe there was something wrong with the oven. First thought was to chuck the lot, but BH dissuaded me and I moved one loaf to the much smaller top oven and tried cooking it there, with an overhead heating element (which doubles as the grill) and no fan. Not very optimistic.

But while it did not rise again, it did cook - and so I cooked the second loaf.

The crumb was rather odd, rather like an albino pumpernickel. A bit chewy, but it went down well enough, flavoured with a spot of Lincolnshire Poacher.

Further inspection confirmed that the bottom oven was not getting hot, although it did seem that some heat was getting through. And it had been working that very morning. So buy new or repair? DIY or cooker man? This all seemed terribly complicated at 19:00 and further consideration was postponed to the following morning. But BH did hunt out her copy of the very last Argos catalogue, perhaps to become a collectible in years to come.

The cooker was a Zanussi electric, model ZCV66000WA. Cheap enough from John Lewis, but it has served well for seven years or so, for which see refence 2. Then poking around on the Zanussi website, we found that what we thought was the right heating element  - we had a choice of three - cost around £30. It didn't look that complicated to fit the thing oneself: remove the cover plate at the back of the oven and off you go. Might even be a 5 minute job.

But then we discovered that Zanussi offer a fixed price repair service, complete with an online booking system and the trimmings one expects from a large company, now owned, as it happens, by Electrolux, who had snapped it up at a time when Zanussi in particular and Italy in general were having a spot of economic and financial trouble. So for £150 or so I could book a slot and they would send someone to fix it. Which I did. It might be a touch dear at around a third of the current purchase price, but it does save one all the bother and risk of plucking a cooker man off the wall. A cooker man who might or might not answer his phone, who might or might not turn up.

So far so good, with the only fly so far in this particular ointment being gmail finding the confirmatory email from the cooker man in Chelmsford to be suspect. Yellow warning bars! Do not click on anything!

We will have to ask him how many miles he expects to do in the average day, with this laptop saying that it is around 40 miles from Chelmsford to Epsom.

In the meantime I fret about how long it took me to work out that the heating element had gone. Or worse still, that it hasn't gone at all...

Three quarters of the first loaf now tucked away. Next batch pencilled in for Tuesday.

PS: can't tell from gmaps whether the overgrown house noticed at reference 2 has been redeveloped. Clearly time for a return visit.

References

Reference 1: https://www.zanussi.co.uk/.

Reference 2: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/2015/08/zanussi-or-bust.html.