Braided Spaghetti Bread

Original Image from Rhodes Bread

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This sounded like a great concept, which is why I pinned it.  When I make spaghetti, I almost invariably serve it with garlic bread and salad.  This particular method of service - inside of garlic bread - was ingenious!  Nice, compact, pretty - what more could you ask for?

Well.

Lots, as it turns out.

This isn't a particularly hard recipe to put together.  I used whole wheat pasta, as that's the standard in our household, and my from-scratch marinara sauce recipe, which happens to be my husband's favourite.  With those two things in the mix, we didn't think anything could go wrong.

Ready for the oven

 And, as it turned out, it was easy to put together.  The cutting of the dough was explained in ample clarity, and I was able to create the lovely, complex-appearing braided top in just a couple of minutes.  "This will blow people's minds!" I thought.  "I'm making this all the time for guests - they'll all say I'm a genius!"

I was a little ahead of myself.

 Now, this did, I will admit, come out of the oven looking lovely.  It was golden brown and slightly shiny on top.  The smell was amazing - marinara and garlic and freshly baked bread combining to make the house seem like we'd been transported on whole to Italy.  Or at least the Olive Garden.

Really, who wouldn't want to eat that?  It's gorgeous!

I sliced us off both lovely, steaming hunks of garlic bread and spaghetti goodness.  The melted chunks of mozzarella were oozing through the braid and into the pasta and we couldn't wait and then...

And then we ate it.

Oh.

The pasta had become kind of a soggy lump inside of the bread.  I had cooked it to barely al dente, assuming it would soften more while baking, but this was... strange.  My lovely sauce had mostly evaporated, leaving the pasta dry and sticky.  Worst of all, the inside of the bread was doughy and almost... slimy.  It had that texture that an undercooked dumpling will sometimes get in an ill-prepared soup.

What the heck happened?  We felt like we were eating mushy mouthfuls of raw dough or something.  It was not good.  It was not good at all.

I thought maybe this could be salvaged.  Some things just... taste better the next day, right?  I wrapped up the massive leftovers and stuck them in the fridge, only to discover that minimal microwave heating turned leftovers into hunks of petrified wood.

Blech.

Nope, we won't be making this again.  Ever.  I won't recommend you try it, either, unless you're really brave, or really like mushy textures, or plan on feeding it to someone with minimal teeth and no taste buds or something.  Icky poo.  My first Pinterest thumbs down!