Dyed Bread?

The original plan was to make monkey bread, but it changed when the three year old who likes to touch everything visited for the evening. Thoughts of sticky fingers everywhere change the plans. We’d been at a party to celebrate an adoption becoming o-fish-ial. The theme was fish, of course.

With fish you need water, and some of the sandwiches were made with bright green and blue bread. I was told that the Publix Supermarket bakery had made it, and I was inspired.

Since it was too late put the coloring into the mix with the other ingredients I decided to try kneading it into half the dough to make marble or swirl bread. I should have known better, but it was a learning experience.



The ingredients here are the same as in Oatmeal Bread – part1. I have measured the temperature of the dough coming out of the bread machine dough cycle several times now and 93.7 F is typical and warmer than room temperature.



After the dough came out of the bread machine I split it into two roughly equal pieces. The idea was to color one and then flatten both out and roll them up so there was a spiral of color.



I have some good paste food colors from Wilton, so I took a toothpick and put some onto one section of dough.



The idea was to knead the dough and spread the color evenly. It wasn’t going to happen. I kneaded away for a few minutes and about all that happened was the dough got really sticky and stuck to my hands. The color didn’t mix in very much.
I put the “dyed red” piece on the plain piece and squeezed them together.



The formed loaf has the dyed piece on the inside. Looking at it in the pan there was no sign of any dye.



At the start of proofing it is indistinguishable from any of the other Oatmeal Bread loaves I have made recently.





 

The proofed loaf before baking is in the left photo, and the baked loaf is on the right. It was baked for 60 minutes at 300 F and had a nice spring in the oven.



The cooling loaf shows no sign that there is red lurking inside.



I waited until the next morning to slice it, since the bread slices much nicer when it has cooled completely. I was both pleased and disappointed by what I saw. Pleased because there were nice flashes of red in the slices, disappointed because the result was less that what I envisioned when my plans for Monkey Bread had to change.

It was a learning experience, and I am planning to try dyed bread again. Next time I make dyed bread I’ll add the color to the water. That means that I will need to make two separate batches of dough for two colors in one loaf. It should be fun.