Toast Bread

Hello All. First post here of TFL. I had been blogging about my bread for a while with blogspot but I seem to be spending more and more time on this website lately so I thought I'd move my blog over here as well. I've learned a lot from the postings on this site. It is such a great resource for bakers, so hopefully I will get some constructive feedback on my baking by posting here.

Over the past several months I have been trying to work through all of the recipes in Hamelman's Bread Book. There is so much in there that I figured baking my way through it would give me a solid foundation in baking all types of bread. While I am only part way through the book I have already identified and revisited some of my favorites. One of these is the recipe for Toast Bread.

I am actually quite surprised at how much I like this bread, since at first glance it looks like a fairly plain white loaf. The flavor is much more than would be expected though, and it truly makes exceptional toast.

For this bake, I tried to follow the recipe as written except for one thing. The book calls for both bread flour and high gluten flour. Since I don't have any flour that is higher gluten than my bread flour, for the high protein portion I mixed bread flour with some vital wheat gluten in a 3:1 ratio. This seems to work fairly well, but may be a bit more gluten than intended as the dough can get very strong especially if folded too much or left in the fridge overnight. I didn’t notice this last time, but this time it was very stiff after a night in the fridge and was actually kinda tough to cut through with my dough scraper when I was scaling the loaves.

The loaves were scaled to 1000g and baked in loaf pans. I only have one 9” Pullman pan so only one was baked with a lid on it. I put a pan of water in the bottom of the oven and sprayed the oven generously to make steam. After 15 minutes I took the lid off of the Pullman pan. Next time use less dough or take the lid off sooner as it was really hard to get off after the dough had expanded so much. II finished baking for another 25 minutes until the crust was a rich golden color.

The finished product came out very nice despite the tightness of the dough and the flavor is just as good as the first time I made it. My only complaint is that there is a doughy spot at the bottom of the one loaf I have cut through. This had happened a couple times since baking in my new oven. I’m not sure why though as the loaves seem fully cooked otherwise. I’ll have to work on this.