The Cinnamon Swirl Bread in previous posts, pt1 and pt2, have come out quite tasty, but have had a tendency to unroll. This post is about an attempt to solve the unrolling problem.
As can be seen in this photo of the sliced loaf, the swirl is not continuous. It has been broken by non swirled areas where the bread is joined across the swirl, “gluing” the bread across the swirl.
Two loaves of Oatmeal Bread were made for this post, one with interrupted swirl for this post, and one just to eat. The recipe below totals 1845 grams of ingredients, too much for the bread machine, so I used the stand mixer.
Oatmeal Bread Recipe for Two 9×5 pans
- Honey 124 grams
- Water 645 grams
- Quick Oats 171 grams
- Bread Flour 841 grams
- Sugar 42 grams
- Salt 13 grams
- Bread Machine Yeast 9 grams
The dough was kneaded on the bread hook for 7 minutes after all the ingredients formed up into a ball in the mixer. After kneading the dough was transferred into an eight cup measure for the bulk ferment.
The left photo shows the dough when it was first put into the measuring cup for the bulk ferment. The right photo shows it 85 minutes later, nicely doubled in volume.
The dough was punched down and divided into two pieces. The one for the swirl was 920 grams, the other was 916 grams. The plain loaf was formed and put into a pan before starting work on the swirl.
First step in making the swirl was spreading the dough out into a rectangle about 8 inches wide on the floured counter top.
With the dough spread on the counter it was masked with three strips of wax paper held in place by the weight of 6 spoons, as shown in the picture above. The exposed dough was painted liberally with extra virgin olive oil, which is also shown above. At the top of the photo there is an unpainted area of dough so that when the dough is rolled up into a loaf shape the end of the spiral can be sealed down to hold the last cinnamon swirl section in place.
Cinnamon was sprinkled onto the oiled sections of the dough, then sugar was sprinkled over the cinnamon. I didn’t check the individual amounts of oil, cinnamon, and sugar, but the loaf weighed 964 grams at the start of proofing so the total weight of all three was 44 grams.
With the waxed paper masks removed the dough shows the alternating stripes of plain dough and cinnamon sugar coated dough. With four stripes of each the dough is ready to be rolled up into a loaf shape. Rolling it up tends to stretch it out some so the result fits nicely into the 9 inch long pan.
The left photo shows the rolled up dough. The dough stretched out in the rolling process so the center of the roll is a bit longer than the outside. The right side shows the loaves in the pans at the beginning of the proof. The left pan holds the swirl loaf, the right the plain oatmeal loaf. The plain loaf has puffed up some, partially proofing while the swirl loaf was put together. It is noticeably larger at both the start and end of proofing.
These two photos show the proof dough on the left and the baked bread on the right. The plain loaf has proofed to a larger size than the cinnamon swirl loaf, but the baked loaves are about the same size after baking. The oven spring for the cinnamon swirl loaf was considerably more than the plain loaf. I’m not sure why, but the swirl loaf opened up the crust on the side and the crust remained intact on the plain loaf. (This suggests an experiment, cutting the top of one of a pair of loaves as is done with baguettes to see what the two loaves look like after they are baked.) These loaves were baked for 50 minutes in an oven preheated to 300 F.
The two loaves are cooling on a rack here. The swirl loaf is in front and the cinnamon is visible on the end of the loaf and on the side where the oven spring pulled the top crust up from the side near the middle of the loaf.
These last two pictures are included to show the way that the spiral of cinnamon sugar was distributed through the loaf. The right picture shows all of the slices, the left shows a typical slice with more resolution.
Weight Loss From Baking
A week after the two loaves discussed so far in this post two more loaves were made with the same recipe. The plain loaves weighed 911, 923, and 920 grams before baking. Out of the oven they weighed 874, 885, and 881 grams. After cooling completely they weighed 847, 860, and 852 grams. The swirl loaf was 964 before the oven, 927 grams out of the oven, and cooled weighed 902 grams. This work out to about 4% loss in the oven after 50 minutes at 300F, and an additional loss of about 3% during the cooling process. Total losses are about 7%. This is probably not statistically significant as it’s limited data, but gives an idea of how much dough might be needed to reach the target weight for a loaf.