Submitted by baker_sf on February 6, 2008 - 4:47pm
I am new to making bread, and have made a number of loaves using King Arthur bread flour, salt, water and a sourdough starter. The bread tastes great, but when I toast it I am never able to get the crumb to turn brown and crispy, no matter how long I toast it for. What could be going wrong? (The toaster works fine by the way...)
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Toasting bread
I understand that it is the sugar and variations of such that make bread go brown when it toasts. And also has an impact on how quickly bread toasts. You will notice that eg fruit breads toast more easily than bread with no or little sweet stuff in it.
Have you tried using the griller? It will also give a more even toasting.
Heather
The browning is
The browning is carmelization and as Heather pointed out, without enough sugar in the bread there won't be much browning going on (I have observe this as well). With a traditional basic dough of flour, water, yeast and salt the yeast will have consumed all the redily available sugars during their early fermenting. You could add some additional sugar to encourage browning. In fact, most recipes I see for sandwich bread (what I think of as toasting bread) usually call for some sugar in the recipe.