Seasoned Advice is a question and answer site for professional and amateur chefs. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
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?
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.
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.
