Lately I’ve been making bread.
I know people have been on this bandwagon since the start of the panini, but by bread making adventures are more out of necessity.
I like bread. But I’m not a big sourdough man. I want something light and fluffy to put cheese and cold cuts and salad on. Maybe a little peanut butter. But living in a gentrified neighbourhood, the options are stark.
The Aldi down the road is abominable. Bread from Aldi is made off-site before being shipped in, and in my experience it’s stale before it’s even put on the shelves.
The cheap Woolies bread is decent, but the store has staffing issues. Recently the sole baker went on leave. I don’t begrudge them that, but it meant there was no fresh bread on the shelves, and it had a flow-on effect to other supermarkets nearby. Fresh bread became impossible to get!
Then there’s the French patisserie around the corner. I’ve tried their baguette a few times and it’s alright, but it’s crusty enough to cut your teeth on. I don’t like bread that leaves sore bits in your mouth for the rest of the day so it’s really only an occasional thing.
So at my wit’s end I’m making fresh bread.
Japanese Milk Bread
It started with a message from Ben (as it often does):
Milk bread is not the easiest bread, especially to start with, so I’m told. But I was sitting around at my parents’ place with an idle Thermomix and little else to do so I figured I’d give it a shot.
The tricky part of milk bread is the tangzhong, which is a paste of cooked flour and milk. Wikipedia says it improves the texture of the bread, and also “stabilizes the wheat starches in the bread, to prevent recrystallization” which stops it going stale.
The recipe had Thermomix instructions for the first steps. I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with the Thermie because the recipe paywall stuff is a nuisance when trying to find a recipe, and it’s kinda hard to deviate from a set plan. But this one was a custom, non-wizard affair so it was fairly easy to follow. The trickiest part was finding the “dough” setting — apparently it just spins the blades backwards rather than having a specialised dough hook.
As it was my first time making bread, and it seemed to take forever, because I was hanging on every step of the recipe. Peering at the Thermie waiting for the temperature to get just so. Waiting around for the bread to prove. I didn’t want to leave it, in case it grew legs and ran off.
But the results were great. The bread was true to its tangzhong: soft and fluffy and kind of set my bar high for the rest of my bread making career.
Making bread with a Ninja
At home I don’t have a Thermomix, but I do have a Ninja Foodi Power Blender and Processor System which comes with a dough hook. So I got myself a loaf tin, and tried to recreate the magic.
The Ninja was a bit fiddly on the dough setting. The program runs for exactly one minute and it rattled all over the bench so I needed to hold it down. It seemed super quick for a bread loaf so I ran it again and it went into some kind of shutdown protection mode, presumably because the motor was working too hard.
I later found out you’re supposed to manually break the dough up before running it again, which helps the food processor process it. But even with one and a half runs, the bread came out super impressive for a second attempt.
Soft white bread is too hard
Having mastered the milk bread, and truth be told gotten a little sick of it, I turned my attention toward white bread.
And so I set out confidently on my next bake. Little did I know it would be my undoing.
I don’t know exactly what went wrong, but it was probably a combo of:
- I got scared of the Ninja dough setting burning the motor out, so I only did one run of the kneading. That’s 60 seconds, which is probably much too short.
- It’s summer, and we’ve been in a heatwave so the temperature has been pretty high and they may have proved too fast.
- I think I probably let them prove too long, because:
They immediately deflated in the oven. The first attempt came out like a long flat bread brick. It was edible, but highly questionable.
The second time I tried to prove in the fridge to try to account for the heat variable. It didn’t seem to do much.
And to make matters worse, I took it out of the oven too soon so it was still raw in some parts. I’m not even going to show that one because it was a disaster.
Thankfully Shawn was here to help eat the edible bits. And it was tasty! But a fair bit of it went in the bin.
So even though that was only yesterday I thought I’d give it one more try. This time I:
- Ran the dough through the food processor several times. It came out a much better, springy consistency.
- Didn’t fuck around while proofing. I let it go for 30 minutes the first time, and another 40 minutes the second time.
- Gave it a bit of a bash to make sure it wasn’t going to collapse before putting it in the oven. It stayed solid.
- Got overly excited and underbaked the damn thing again lol.
So I sit here staring at my still slightly-flat loaf cooling on the rack. Apparently allowing the bread to come to room temperature rather than tucking right in “optimizes texture and flavour, and there are several theories as to why“. So I’m gonna leave it go.
Several hours later
I cut the bread and to my surprise it actually looks like bread.
It’s still a touch heavy, but the texture is about right. One jam and peanut butter sandwich later I’m content.
I still don’t entirely know what went wrong with the others, but the extra kneading and possibly the quicker proving time made a difference. Next time I’ll just have to keep it in long enough for a bit more colour. And I think if I want it to be any taller I might need to multiply the recipe.
I’m not sure how to get it fluffier but apparently there are various types of tangzhong that can help get more moisture in, so I might try that next.
Anyway if you have any ideas, hit me up. I’m keen to hear your tips and tricks. You can reply to this thread on Mastodon or just shoot me an email.