September 26, 2007 - 4:22pm
Improving keeping quality
I plan to make Floyd's/Jeffrey Hamelman's Cinnamon Raisin Oatmeal Bread tomorrow to send to a relative. It will reach her late Friday or early Saturday. I'd like to tweak the recipe just a bit to improve the keeping quality. This will be the first time I'm making this bread, so don't want to make many changes. Maybe it keeps so long, I don't need to worry about this, but I can't tell from reading the recipe!
I thought I would add 2 Tbsp. of granular lecithin and 1 teaspoon of diastatic malt powder to the recipe. I just got these ingredients from King Arthur, and haven't used them at all. Do they affect the flavor?
What do you think?
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Hi KipperCat, I'm sorry I can't advise you on how to improve the shelf life of your bread and I'm not sure about the lecithin, but diastatic malt will not help the bread keep longer and may throw your recipe out of whack.
Diastatic malt contributes amylase, which breaks down starch into sugars that the yeast can use. Malt is typically added to the flour at the mill. Additional malt may be called for by certain recipes that have a very long fermentation. If your white flour is not malted you mght add some, but most non-organic flours are (and so are some organic ones, which I prefer). Whole grain flours are usually not malted, but recipes that call for these flours will have already taken this into account. If you add malt when it is not needed, you may speed up the fermentation of your dough and get unexpected results.
Susanfnp
http://www.wildyeastblog.com
Thanks! I was afraid of something like that. For now, I'll save the malt for recipes that call for it.
But I know from doing other dried-fruit breads, if you've got really dry fruit, soak it first so it doesn't pull excess moisture from the loaf.
SOL
That's something the recipe calls for. I noticed the link doesn't show up very well in the first post. Here it is if you're interested.
http://www.thefreshloaf.com/recipes/cinnamonraisinoatmealbread
For some reason, an extra space shows up at the end of many of the links posted here. You can easily lop it off when you get the Not Found message. But I wonder why it happens in the first place.
Rosalie
Rosalie, it happens because when we cut and paste the link, we don't cut it off right at the end of the link, but clip an extra space by mistake. I'll go back and edit the link I just put in - if I can.
(later) Well, either someone beat me to it, or it isn't happening when I select the links. At any rate, I couldn't fix it.
You can tell if the link is going to have an extra space by hovering your mouse pointer over it. Now the underscore ends with the text of the link; earlier it extended out one more character.
Rosalie
This may be crazy, but sourdough loaves certainly keep longer than yeasted, so I've taken to adding a bit of my discard to things like bagels, just to make them last a bit longer. It seems to work pretty well; the recipes aren't fermenting long enough for the sourdough taste to come through strongly, and I haven't added enough to cause any major explosions...
Good luck!
edh
I'll try that. About how much do you add?
I can't remember if any of the other books mentioned on this site include this info, but RLB's Bread Bible gives you directions on how to sub in sourdough in a regular yeasted bread. Either that or you could wing it, just subtracting out the equivalent amount of water and flour you're adding.
SOL
That's what I did - subbing in 214 grams of sourdough to the 2204 gram recipe. I also added 1 tablespoon of granular lecithin. The raw dough tasted pretty good! I don't usually sample bread dough, but the cinnamon smelled so good I had to try it.