Opiates everywhere and not a drop to eat

So if you're Polish, or know a Polish baker, or maybe been to a Polish bakery then you may be familiar with the most delicious poppy bread. OMG, so unbelievably good. It's this challah like bread that is filled with a sweet poppy seed filling and rolled up in a jelly roll form of sweet opiate heaven. Perhaps it IS the poppy that makes it so good, but whatever makes it so good is indeed drug-like.

So not having a cooking adventure in awhile I decided to take on the poppy bread. Jeff's cousin was coming over for brunch on Sunday so I thought it might be a nice treat to have in the bread basket. Not wanting to wake up really early Sunday morning for the three risings that the recipe called for, I decided to start the bread on Saturday.

Early afternoon Saturday after having tucked Jeff in on the couch to continue his ear infection recovery and just having finished cleaning a week's worth of dishes (what happens when Jeff is sick and I don't do the dishes), I was ready to begin. I managed to scrounge and find a package of yeast, although it's alive-ness was questionable. The bread itself took many various steps (and this is from the old red Polish cookbook that never really quite explains what in the world it is talking about): heating milk, creaming butter and sugar (still not sure why that was required), along with the usual of "waking up" the yeast, plus making the poppy seed filling mixture.

I managed to get through the first questionable step, whether or not the yeast was alive, and it appeared to be, so I happily continued through all of the bread making steps (there still remains some question though whether or not the water I used for the yeast was too hot, there was definitely a response, but it didn't rise as much as I would have expected). I plopped the now smooth ball of dough into the oiled bowl and let it to rise. In the meantime I went ahead making the poppy mixture which was simply 1 cup (yes a whole freakin' cup) of poppy seeds plus some milk and honey and an egg. I failed to follow the directions, and ended up with more of a poppy soup. I think I heated the honey up too hot (questionable whether or not that actually did anything), but what I didn't do was heat the mixture with the egg. Luckily I had my head on straight and wondered how such a liquidy mixture could possibly be a filling and I also wondered when exactly the egg that was called for in the mixture would be cooked. Luckily I put 2 and 2 together and was able to recover. Whew!

After the bread had sufficiently risen I was to punch it down and allow it to rise again. This was the point at which I was going to throw it in the fridge and pull it out in the morning and let it rise then. I have seen recipes where you can let things rise overnight, so I thought it was possible that it might do the rising overnight which would be fine too. Of course, what I didn't do when I originally threw the dough in the bowl was to make sure the whole thing was oiled so as to not form a skin. Well, form a skin it did. I poured extra grease in and let it rest for the night.

Sunday morning when I got up I was pleasantly surprised to find that it did in fact rise overnight, which was (hopefully) going to cut down on the time going forward. So I rolled it out, filled it with poppy goodness and rolled it up. Looked perfect. My mouth was watering. I then set it for it's last rising. Unfortunately what I hadn't counted on was that this last rising would take forever because the dough was still really cold from the fridge. Darn. So what was supposed to be an hour rising took about 2.5 hours, but I had the time, so no big deal.

Since the last rise took so darn long, I had oodles of time to pre-heat the oven. I set the dial for 350 and when it was finally ready to go in, I checked the temperature in the oven. The thermometer read 300 deg. So fine, what a normal person would do (since I like to consider myself normal), is think to herself: "the oven has been pre-heating forever, so clearly the oven temperature is running 50 deg lower than it should (it has had plenty of time to get up to temperature, so that's not the problem. I'll set it at 400." Which is exactly what I did (if you hadn't guessed that yet).

I then set the timer for 30 minutes (15 minutes shy of the what the recipe said) and headed into the living room to finish watching a terrible movie that I started the night before. The movie finished exactly after 30 minutes had elapsed so I headed back into the kitchen to check on the bread. I opened the oven and I found two things:

1. an oven that was exactly heated to 400 degrees
2. a very dark loaf of poppy bread

I believe there were tears. I had been SO excited about the bread and I TOTALLY screwed the whole thing up. A two day adventure all wasted. I tried cutting off the bottom (which was burnt), but it still wasn't good. I gave it to Jeff to try and he then tried to hide half of it under the carpet (that's not really true, he did try it, but he simply chose to donate the second half to the trash can). Then I tried to cut off the top of the bread, which was dark, but not burnt. That's when I realized that even the inside of the bread (the totally white fluffy and full of poppy part) was gross. The recipe was bad. This was NOT NOT NOT the poppy bread recipe that I was so fond of. I don't know what it was, a dirty imposter, but it was not good and the reason was NOT because I cooked it at the wrong temperature. The flavor was all wrong. It wasn't nearly sweet enough. Too much poppy flavor. It was all very very wrong.

I was all ready to share the recipe from my poppy bread delight, but I will not subject anyone to the imposter fake poppy bread recipe. I will find the right one and I will do it right and I will share that one. Sorry, you get nothing .... for now.

I promise you this: I will get you next time my poppy bread....

oh, and if anyone has what they believe to be a real Polish poppy bread recipe, PLEASE send it my way!