June 11, 2019 - 7:20pm
Challah issue!
This way my first attempt at a challah (Peter Reinhart's Crust and Crumb) and I have to say that the crumb is just amazing. Unfortunately, the egg yolk wash didn't go as planned. I have washed plenty of breads before, but I have never had this type of blackening happen to me before. Dark brown, sure, but this was nuts. I have two hunches; 1) I used coconut sugar instead of regular white sugar, and 2) I used a little bit of olive oil when kneading to keep things moist so as not to dry out the dough with too much flour.
Any thoughts on why this might have happened to me?
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I'm guessing the oil is the difference. Despite what marketers would have you believe, coconut sugar is just plain old sugar, no better (and no worse either) because it's exactly the same thing as beet sugar and cane sugar. (If people say they can taste the traces of impurities in these different sources of sugar, I believe them - but that's nothing from a baking/burning point of view.)
EDIT: If the recipe called for white sugar, and you used (any style of) brown sugar, that could be a problem. There's a reason we have recipes. ?
how long and on which shelf? Oven setting? (Upper heat, lower heat, with fan, upper heat with fan, etc.)
Recipe for egg wash? How much sugar was in it?