Monthly Archives: March 2017

A Dough Whisk?

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The first time I saw a picture of a dough whisk I thought they had to be kidding. Who would want one, and then what would you ever do with it if you were foolish enough to spend money on one?

Then I started using a big spoon to mix the flour and liquid ingredients together before kneading them with the bread hook. It didn’t take me long to realize that a big spoon was not the way to mix the wet and dry bread ingredients enough so they could be kneaded. The spoon collected a big glob of dough on it, with dry flour in the middle, and it was hard work. I began to wonder if a dough whisk might not be such a crazy idea.

So I bought one. It was under $10 on Amazon.com, the one I bought is no longer available, but this one is virtually the same thing. Mixing bread dough to get it ready to knead is still hard work with a bread whisk, but it’s a lot easier than with a spoon.


This picture shows my brand new never used bread whisk in front of the beginnings of 2700 grams of white bread dough to make three 900 gram loaves. My old stand mixer can handle about 1800 grams of dough, so this batch will be kneaded by hand.

This post is on White bread Variation 3 from The Bread Baker’s Apprentice again, scaled up some from the earlier post White Bread Variation 3. This time using skim milk rather than whole milk yogurt.

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St Patrick’s Day Green Bread

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One of my daughter’s kids was here helping me make some bread and said “Let’s make it green!” By that time we were already at the kneading stage so it was too late. Also, it was anadama bread with molasses in it so the bread is fairly dark and the green dye would have had some real competition. Then I realized that St. Patrick’s Day was almost here and that was the perfect excuse for bright green bread. I took a recipe for white bread, scaled it up to get two two pound loaves, and added in 4 grams of Kelly Green Wilton® Icing Color. The photo shows how it came out nice and green.

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Let’s Dye Bread Blue

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One of my daughter’s kids had a birthday party the other day. The kids had really enjoyed the bread I dyed purple a while ago, so I decide to make her a loaf of bread dyed a nice blue color. I used Wilton® Royal Blue Icing Color to provide the blue color. Oatmeal bread is popular with the kids, so that’s what this bread is. It was mixed using the dough cycle in my bread machine. This recipe works well with the dough cycle although it’s a bit too big to bake in the bread machine as it might overflow the pan.



The color comes in a one ounce (28.3 gram) jar, and I used 2 grams of the color. As the picture above shows, it gave the bread a nice blue color.

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White Bread, Variation 3

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Peter Reinhart in The Bread Baker’s Apprentice has three variations for white sandwich bread. This is the third variation, made with a sponge that is allowed to ferment before the remainder of the ingredients for the dough are added. Variation 1 was made in a previous post. Each of the three variations may be made with a variety of liquids and fats, making for many more than three possible ways to make the same basic recipe.

In general, each post here deals with one batch of bread. This post deals with two separate batches. In the second batch I corrected some problems from the the first batch.

 





 

The left picture above is Variation 3. There was very little oven spring and as a result the slices were too short for my toaster. They didn’t stick out far enough when the toast popped up to pick up without touching the hot metal. So I scaled the batch size up by about 10% to 2000 grams. Looking at the right hand picture of the Variation 3a loaves you can see that I over did it, these slices are too big to fit all the way into the toaster.

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