Can I salvage an uncooked bread?
I made pan de muerto roughly following this recipe. I put the breads in the oven (made 3), took them out and let them cool completely. Today (the morning after), I cut into the first one and see that the middle is completely undone. Raw dough, with raw eggs and orange juice still in the mix.
What can I do to save this? Can I put them back in the oven or something like that?
Best Answer
I wouldn't recommend to bake this again and eat it because there is a food safety issue. If you had noticed this right after baking, this would not be a problem regarding food safety. But since the bread stayed for many hours in the danger zone and since it contained perishable ingredients like eggs, I strongly suggest to discard the raw bread.
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Quick Answer about "Can I salvage an uncooked bread?"
In most situations, an undercooked loaf of bread can be fixed by returning it to the oven for a few more minutes. This is true for loaves where the outside of your bread may look fully set, but the inside of the bread is still gummy. Place the loaf back in a preheated oven at 350° F for 10-20 minutes.How do you salvage Unrisen bread?
If your dough hasn't risen, then it's not worth baking it as it is or it'll be too dense to enjoy. Instead, you can roll it out very thin and bake it as a flatbread or a pizza. Alternatively, you can dissolve more active yeast in some warm water, then work it into the dough and see if it rises.How do you Rebake bread?
Wrap the loaf tightly with aluminum foil, place it on the middle rack of a cold oven, and set the temperature to 300 degrees. After about 30 minutes (15 to 20 minutes for small or narrow loaves like baguettes), remove the foil and return the loaf to the oven for about 5 more minutes to crisp up the crust.Why is my bread uncooked in the middle?
Your bread could be undercooked or unbaked inside for the following reasons: Your oven was too hot, so the outside of the bread cooked faster than the inside. You pulled your bread out of the oven too early. You didn't let your dough reach room temperature before baking it.What's that??? Gummy, raw dough, under-baked or bread not rising???
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Answer 2
Nothing can be done, I'm afraid. Yeast create gasses that get trapped as tiny bubbles in the dough. Those bubbles become the air pockets you see in the bread's crumb. The dough in the interior of your undone bread has collapsed on all these little air pockets. Yeast die in oven temperatures, so no new pockets are ever going to form in the collapsed portion of the dough. Putting it in the oven (or cooking it in any other way) is simply going to harden that undone dough into something heavy, solid, and very un-breadlike; it's not going to re-inflate.
So, what can you do? 1) You can cut away the uncooked portion and use the remaining bread for croutons, stuffing, bread pudding, etc. 2) Sometimes, accidents like this lead to creative solutions. You might consider slicing the loaf in half horizontally, scooping out the undone portions, and filling the cavity with some kind of a sweet filling that would compliment the bread - like perhaps a cream cheese and nut mixture. Put the two halves back together, and slice into portions.
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Images: Julia M Cameron, Klaus Nielsen, Flora Westbrook, Klaus Nielsen