The Fresh Loaf

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How to achieve bread with the perfect moisture and color

julianvidela14's picture
julianvidela14

How to achieve bread with the perfect moisture and color





Hello everyone,
I am a beginning baker and am trying to improve my technique to achieve bread with the perfect moisture and color. He was experimenting with different ratios of ingredients and cooking times, but still did not achieve the desired result.

I was wondering if anyone could share some tips or techniques for achieving bread with proper moisture and a golden color. What proportions of water and yeast should I use? How can I make sure that the crust is soft and the inside is moist, achieving that color on the outside like the one in the attached photo?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks for your time.

a cordial greeting

pmccool's picture
pmccool

For the objectives you've mentioned (soft golden crust and moist crumb), you don't need to be concerned about yeast.  It's effects are minimal on those features.

For the moist crumb, there are several ways to get that.  One way is to use some form of fat, which could be butter, ghee, margarine, oil, shortening, egg yolks, or full-fat dairy milk, to name a few sources.  Another way is to use the tangzhong method, which involves cooking a small portion of the flour in the recipe with some of the liquid in the recipe.  Use the Search tool to get more information about tangzhong.  Another way is to use plenty of water or milk in the dough so that the dough is quite soft and somewhat sticky.

A soft crust is usually the result of baking at relatively low temperatures for the minimum amount of time to fully cook the loaves or rolls.  You can also brush the finished loaves or rolls with melted butter after they come out of the oven.  When the loaves or rolls have cooled almost to room temperature, placing them in plastic bags will also help to soften the crust, since it will trap the moisture that migrates from the crumb of the bread out to the crust.

A golden crust also requires baking the bread at relatively low temperatures for the shortest practical time, since a longer bake at higher temperatures will increase the crust's darkness.  Further, there needs to be adequate sugar in the dough to facilitate browning.  You can achieve this by including sugar, honey, syrups, milk, or eggs in the dough.

If you want to achieve something that looks like the photo in your post, you may need to adjust your expectations.  That appears to be a commercially baked roll and those often have a lot of additives which aren't available to the home baker.  You can get fairly close to that by employing the ingredients and methods I've mentioned, above.  Even if your bread doesn't quite match the commercial product in appearance, it will taste a lot better.

Paul