Monday, October 1, 2012

ABC bread

 Wonderful challenge for this month's Avid Bakers: Bread. Always a joy to bake that. Honey Oatmeal Bread is on the menu. We love oats, so that's great and the kids (and I) love to eat some white bread every once in a while.

I made some changes to the recipe:
- I used just 1 tsp salt, because I always just use 1 tsp for breads with about 500 g of flour. This bread even used less flour, so the 1,5 tsp salt that was in the recipe is just way too salty for us.
- I also used less yeast (about 1 1/2 tsp instead of  2 1/4 tsp). Less yeast means a slower rise, and that not only gives more taste, but also more control over the dough, as I'm not the kind of person who watches their dough like a hawk every ten minutes. I just take a look when I remember I was baking in the first place, so it's nice the dough takes it easy as well.
- I used bread flour instead of AP, cause of the weakness of our AP-flour here in the Netherlands. (Our AP-flour is better for use in cakes, cookies ecc.)
- When all the ingredients were kneading, I saw it was too wet. So I had to add about 60-80 g more flour to get a dough that could be shaped.
Honey Oatmeal Bread
All a lovely give-me-another-slice-kind-of-bread, moist and great taste. The oatmeal is totally invisible because it was soaked before adding.

6 comments:

kitchen flavours said...

Your bread is lovely, looks so soft and moist! Yes, I did reduced the salt too, have included that in my post, after reading yours! I'm like you, I always reduce the salt in breads, especially for the ones that contains cheese! This bread is a winner, definitely one that I would make again!

Janis said...

I love the slashed look of your bread....did you use steam during the bake? I also decreased the amount of instant yeast used to 1 1/2 teaspoons...I just thought that using more than 2 teaspoons was too much for a loaf of bread :-)

Hanaâ said...

Great looking loaf. Love the slashing!! I too reduced both the salt and yeast. It worked out great. We loved the bread!

hobby baker Kelly said...

Beautiful! I'd try that recipe out for sure.

Karen Baking Soda said...

You are so right on the salt! (and the yeast... and the water..) I just went ahead with the recipe without thinking... we're still slugging jugs of water haha.
Your bread looks way better than mine, way waaaaay better!

Karin Anderson said...

Very nice looking loaf!
You are absolutely right about the amount of yeast - I think baking book authors try to make the recipes foolproof.
Our all-purpose flour here has almost as much gluten as bread flour, if I bake in Germany I use Type 550, too.