This White Bread recipe is more complex than any of the recipes that have been appeared so far in flourtobread.com. It has egg, a fat (olive oil), dry milk, and mashed potato flakes in it. All of these are new to the ingredient list of things included in the bread. In addition, the dry and wet ingredients are measure and mixed separately before adding wet to dry for final mixing and kneading.
- Bread FLour 525 grams
- Instant Yeast 6 grams
- Sugar 32 grams
- Nonfat Dry Milk 32 grams
- Instant Potato Flakes 37 grams
- Salt 10 grams
The Dry Ingredients:
- Olive Oil 36 grams
- Egg 58 grams
- Water 262 grams
The Wet Ingredients:
This formula is loosely based on one I saw on the King Arthur Flour website for making hotdog rolls. I used it and the hotdog rolls came out wonderful, so I scaled it up to make a kilogram (998 grams actually) of dough and used Olive Oil rather than butter.
Scaling the recipe called for 58 grams of egg. The large eggs available were too small for 58 grams and 2 were too much, so I decided to beat two eggs to get things uniform and weigh out 58 grams. I suspect that using two would have been fine, but I didn’t want to change too much on a first try. My brother had a pet duck. Daisy’s eggs were really huge and when my mother used them in cakes and brownies people commented on how good they were.
I weighed the Egg and the Olive Oil on the 300 gram scale, then put them in larger cup and weighed the water on the Ozeri® kitchen scale. Mixing the liquid up I added it to the blended dry ingredients. After stirring the liquid in they were kneaded on the bread hook for 10 minutes and kneaded a bit by hand. It took 45 minutes for the dough to double in size on the first rise.
The dough was firm and not sticky. My attempt at forming the dough into a loaf shape to fit the pan didn’t work too well. It looks so easy in pictures in books, and I had some minor success with Oatmeal Bread. The dough might have needed a bit more water to make it more pliable, but I managed to get it into a sort of loaf shape and into the pan. The picture on the left is the formed loaf prior to proofing. The one on the right is after proofing and ready for the oven.
When I put the bread into the oven I was a bit disappointed by the size of the loaf. It had doubled in size after proofing for 30 minutes but was still barely out the top of the pan. Watching through the window in the oven door I was amazed. It sprang up like an inflating balloon, showing as it grew how badly I had shaped the loaf.
The bread was baked 60 minutes at 300 F. On the left is an end view of the proofed loaf. It’s barely over the edge of the pan and a crease shows where the dough wasn’t sealed shut when the loaf was shaped. On the right is a view of the same end of the baked loaf. The tiny crease on the end of the loaf has grown into a mighty chasm. Next time I will have to do better. I’ll add a little more water also, which may make the dough a bit easier to form.
Here is the loaf on the cooling rack, with a picture of each side. It shows how the loaf failed to spring evenly in the oven. That is because I failed to keep even surface tension on the formed loaf and didn’t get the seam where the loaf was folded together after punching down (degassing) sealed completely.
Looking at the sliced loaf from the end my failure to properly form the loaf is visible in the lopsided shape of the slices.
Despite the lopsided shape this formula was a success. The bread was good tasting and the texture was even. It might need a little bit more water to make the dough easier to form, but the resulting bread was what I was looking for. It’s funny shape is a result of my inexperience, not a problem with the recipe.