All those extra ingredients
Namely, sugar, fat, and egg...
Not that I've gotten any better with my basic bread baking (flour, yeast, water, salt, sugar, and olive oil), but I visited my mother and baked anyway. Reaction was, can you make the bread any sweeter?
So after two loaves of this with the same reaction, I snapped and went with:
1 cup warm water
1 package active dry yeast
1/4 cup dark brown sugar + 1 Tbsp
3 Tbsp butter (melted)
1 egg
3 1/2 cups bread flour
1 tsp salt
Foam up the yeast with the water and 1 Tbsp sugar, add everything else, knead until smooth, rise, punch, shape, rise, bake 40 min @ 375 F...
I got an oven spring that cracked open the crust and kept going. The resulting loaf was triple if not double the size of the original lump of dough that went into the oven.
The loaf was somewhat sweet and fluffy all right, but is it considred bread with all these extra ingredients? So two questions:
1. How do compete against a demon like this with the basic leaner bread recipe?
2. Suppose I want to tweak this demon for the better, how do I make a more graceful oven spring that doesn't look like the dough cracked open and erupted? I'm posting here on the assumption it's an ingredient tweak more than method. And I pledge to get a kitchen scale so I'll be measuring by weight soon...soon...