Four years ago I used Wilton Kelly Green Icing Color to make the green bread. It worked well, but it was difficult to deal with since it was a paste consistency and did not readily spread evenly through the entire batch of dough. This is a simpler white bread recipe that I have made many many times. The liquid food coloring easily yields a bright and even green to the bread.
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.
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.
In previous posts I have dyed bread purple and made a loaf with red streaks. I have been looking into mixers for bread dough and would like to try a spiral hook as they are apparently more efficient than the typical C shaped hook on my old Kitchen Aid stand mixer. The red streaked loaf was an attempt to add color to mixed dough by kneading it. I wanted pink and got red streaks. For the purple loaf I mixed the dye into the liquid ingredients, which worked quite well.
This is my dough hook, a typical “C” (also known as a “J”) type hook. The disk at the top is to stop the dough from climbing up the hook and getting into the moving parts of the mixer. It works the dough against the sides of the bowl. The volume and consistency of the dough have a serious effect on efficiency of the hook. I would like to try a spiral hook, but have yet to find one compatible with my mixer. The spiral hook pushes the dough down rather than to the side and is said to do a better job developing gluten.
It was obvious to me that the red dye did not mix all that readily with a few minutes of hand kneading. What will happen when a concentrated dye is added after the initial mixing of the wet and dry ingredients? Would it mix the dye in, or would it just bang the dough around the bowl and leave streaks of dyed and undyed bread in the final loaf?
In the previous post I learned that adding paste color to the already mixed dough and trying to knead it in to get a uniform color was not very practical. The conclusion was that the color needed to be added to the ingredients before mixing. That’s what I did for this loaf. The ingredients for this loaf, other than the purle color are the same as for Oatmeal Bread – part1.
For color I used Wilton Violet paste Icing color. It comes in a 1 ounce jar. I was going to go with 1 gram of the colorant in the just over 1000 gram batch but ended up with 1.1 grams since it didn’t seem practical to take .1 gram out of the color I had just dropped into 50 grams of water.
I mixed the dye into the water and added it to the bread machine pan on top of the honey that was already there. Continue reading
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. Continue reading