Is this like broa YOU'RE familiar with?
Living in a part of the world with a fair number of Portuguese folks living here, I've heard of and read about broa bread, but I haven't been able to find a "gold standard" in any local bakery to compare to. I found a broa bread in a Portuguese restaurant, but it was more like a heavy biscuit than a corny, slightly sweetish loaf I've been led to believe it is. So I thought I'd share my latest experiment with the keeners here at TFL to see what you have to say.
Given the good track record of King Arthur Flour, I thought I'd try its rendition of broa bread [1]- here's what the formula ends up looking like for an 850 gram test loaf:
Weight | Bakers % | 850 | |
AP flour | 10.75 | 72.3 | 334.3 |
Hot water | 6 | 40.3 | 186.6 |
Cornmeal | 4.125 | 27.7 | 128.3 |
Milk (warmed) | 4 | 26.9 | 124.4 |
Honey | 1.25 | 8.4 | 38.9 |
Salt | 0.564 | 3.0 | 13.9 |
Olive oil | 0.48 | 3.2 | 14.9 |
Instant yeast | 0.282 | 1.9 | 8.8 |
183.8 |
I followed the recipe exactly, and got a very soft dough - I had to start processing it using Bertinet's flipping technique until it came together a bit - with a bit of graininess from the cornmeal.
Here's what the loaf looked like ....
and here's what the crumb looked like:
Good taste (nowhere near as sweet as I thought it might be, given the honey in it), with a fine-ish crumb (to be expected given the oil and milk in it) and just a bit of crunch from the cornmeal (but not too much because of the initial soaking). I'd make some more down the road as a corny alternative to my usual home baking.
So, anybody here seen/eaten REAL broa bread (ideally, in the old country) to give me an assessment, good, bad or ugly? I wouldn't mind giving some away to some Portuguese people I know, but I want to know how close this may or may not be to the "real" thing.
Thanks in advance.