Can This Be Salvaged? Over-Baked Loaves of Bread

Saturday afternoon, I began a 4-loaf batch of whole wheat sandwich bread, enough to last my household about 10 days. I had just picked up a large bag of all-purpose flour, so I could blend whole wheat and white to make a fluffier loaf than we'd been using for the month of July. I worked at kneading this batch to result in a light texture to the finished bread. The raised loaves went into a hot oven around 6 PM. About 6:10 PM, we received a phone call which put us all into emergency action. I completely forgot about the bread in the oven. However, I did take a couple of minutes to check and lock all of the doors and make sure the stove was turned off. We were gone for over 2 hours. Our urgent errand was taken care of and all was well, with one exception. When we walked in the door, the timer on the oven was ringing and the air had the smell of burnt toast, lots of burnt toast.

This is what very well-done bread looks like. Not only were the 4 loaves very brown on the outside, but they were very lightweight, and had shrunk away from the pans' sides considerably.

Odd thing, I went online and did an image search to see if other people had burned bread this badly, and if that bread could be salvaged, yet the only loaf that I could find pictures of online that were worse-looking than mine was a loaf that was found in Pompeii and had been carbonized by the lava flow.

After a half-hour of feeling sorry for myself, I decided to try cutting away some of the hardened crust from one of the loaves, and this is what I found. Inside, the bread was not that bad. It's a little dry, but once you cut the hard and thick crust off, it's edible, palatable, and salvageable. I estimate that we'll lose about 1/3 of the bread by removing the burnt crust, but a one-third loss is better than a 100% loss.

I like to think of this as pre-toasted bread.