September 8, 2014 - 6:19am
Sandwich Loaf Height
Yesterday my girlfriend made a basic white sandwich loaf with a recipe from The Pocket Bakery book. The recipe seemed very odd to me as it uses around 850g dough for a 450g/1lb loaf tin whilst all of the others would use a 900g/2lbs tin for this amount. After baking, we have a loaf that's just under 6" tall and a great size for sandwiches but the similar sized supermarket equivalents would be around half of the weight.
How do supermarkets/bakeries get the same height as this recipe but with so much less dough? Am I missing a trick or is there something they're adding?
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At my supermarkets there are many kinds of breads for sale. I confess, that I have not tried to categorize them by size and weight, but have to imagine that not all supermarket breads have the same density such that breads of the same size have the same weight.
It sounds like your bread is more dense then the bread you see in the supermarket. It also sounds like you are baking 30 ounces of dough in a 16 ounce tin, recognizing that other recipes called for 32 ounces in a 32 ounce tin.
That seems to answer the question as to why your loaf is so heavy. It uses twice the amount of dough than is called for by the tin. Whatever that may mean, it would suggest that all things being equal, your bread will be more dense unless you get a tremendous rise out of it.
As for what supermarkets do to get the bread they get, I would not go down that path, unless you don't mind adding dough conditioners and other chemicals to your bread. And if that is the case, why bother baking your own bread?
I've never been able to work out whether home-made sandwich loaves are supposed to be the same size as supermarket offerings; I'd never really considered the difference in density! I tried one of the Tesco 'Farmhouse' ones a few weeks ago and the texture was light but really dry; it was weird... almost like a crossover of candy floss/cotton candy and bread... even to the point of feeling like it was dissolving in my mouth!
Overfilling the tin gave a result that we were happy with in terms of height but it definitely needs scaling back a bit!
I always prefer my bread to go about 3 inches above the top of the tin before the dough is put into the oven, this makes the ratio of "spillover" to "tin" about the same once it is baked. In a 8x4 tin, I usually shoot for 650g of dough.
The way I have found to get a high rise is use a very active starter (if using sourdough), a well fermented dough (yeast/bacteria at the height of it's activity), make sure the dough is well-developed (passes a windowpane), and for the dough to be on the stiff side (my standard sandwich loaf is 63% hydration). The last bit is not how the supermarket does it, but I've found that a stiffer dough holds together better as it rises over the top of the pan, making for a taller loaf.
You can find some pictures and the recipe for this loaf on my blog here, if you are curious.
This one was 65% hydration and held its shape fairly well whilst rising. I think we might have underproofed (blew out of the side a bit!) slightly out of fear it would collapse after 2 inches over the tin, 3 inches sounds like it would be too nerve wracking for me haha