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David S. Cargo's Class Notes for Bread Like No Other

Location: Bread Class Home / Thinking About Bread
 

Making Choices

If you starting thinking about bread, about its intended use, and its possible ingredients, you gain a large set of possibilities to choose from.

Avoiding Bad Choices

You need to know the intended use for the bread to avoid making the wrong kind of bread.

  • Ciabatta would not be a good bread for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and French toast. (Too many holes.)
  • A bread with a very tight crumb would be bad for French toast. (It wouldn’t absorb the batter.)
  • A sweet bread might be bad for swiss cheese and tongue sandwiches.
  • A carraway rye bread might be bad for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. (The flavor of the bread would overwhelm the fillings.)
  • Loaves might be too big, small, or irregular for making appropriately sized slices.
  • Dough used for sweet goods can be too tough if made with bread flour.

Making Good Choices

Learning what bread choices might be wrong can help you determine what choices might be right.

In many cases, a bread might be general purpose and not be bad for any particular use. There are many breads like that, and it’s good to know recipes for them.

Often, for my own purposes, the right choice is one that uses up optional ingredients that would otherwise go to waste.

In the past these optional ingredients have included:

  • Half-and-half
  • Milk
  • Yogurt
  • Cottage cheese
  • Sour cream
  • Mayonnaise
  • Cheese
  • Concentrated spiced fruit juice
  • Chives
  • Onions

(Not all in the same bread.) My point here is that good choices can be limited by your imagination, not by the capabilities of bread itself.

Selecting Alternatives

Given what is available and what kind of bread you want, you must choose a workable combination.

Choose the Ingredients

For me, one of the key sets of decisions when making bread is what ingredients do I have available. Or more precisely, what ingredients do I have that I need to use up.

I made a very nice bread using cottage cheese, yogurt, sour cream, and mayonnaise as my wet ingredients.

My milk bread recipe was developed to use up left-over half-and-half.

For sweet doughs where the results are intended to be tender, using all-purpose flour reduces the amount of gluten development. So does adding a source of fat. Adding potato flakes (or mashed potatoes) improves the retention of moisture without adding to the final strength.

Choose the Shape

The shapes of my loaves tend to be pan loaves (for slicing for sandwiches), 3 oz. buns (for veggie burgers), or free-form loaves (if I don’t have a pan handy).

For sweet dough, you can make many items besides cinnamon rolls. There are cinnamon loaves, hedgehogs, various kinds of coffee cakes, and even pie crusts.

Execution

Once I have chosen the ingredients and then the shape, it’s a “simple matter” of making the bread. The decisiion making is done.

Of course, one interesting choice is how long to knead the bread (assuming a recipe that requires it). For sweet dough where tenderness is desired, the dough should be underkneaded.

Bread Like No Other

Because bread made this way can be improvisational, each one is unique, possibly never to be repeated. That’s why I call it bread like no other.

Multigrain Bread Considered

With respect to multigrain bread, I see three main questions, all of which are interrelated.

  • What is multigrain bread?
  • Why is multigrain bread?
  • How is multigrain bread?

What is multigrain bread comes first because without a definition, the subject can’t reasonably discussed.

What is multigrain bread?

The web actually has a page that defines multigrain bread. It says, in part, “Multigrain bread is bread made with multiple grains such as oats, cracked wheat, buckwheat, barley, millet and flax. Some multigrain bread is also whole grain bread.” I would expand this to include breads that are made with multiple kinds of wheat flour, such as durum wheat and spelt, plus other common grains, such as rye, and even less common grains, such as teff.

I also would include breads made with different refinements of wheat, such as bread flour and whole wheat flour.

There are other flours made by finely grinding something, which can also be incorporated into bread. These would include rice flour, wild rice flour, corn flour, and potato flour. Bread containing these can probably be considered multigrain even if the added flour isn’t from a real grain.

It’s also possible to include grains that are not ground into flour if they are properly prepared. Cooked oatmeal, cooked rice, or many other possibilities if using a soaker pre-ferment.

Why is multigrain bread?

There are probably many reasons for making multigrain bread, but perhaps the two most important are nutrition and taste. Where many breads are neutral in flavor, multigrain breads exploit their varied ingredients to add more assertive flavors and interesting textures.

However the ingredients are combined, the result is still supposed to be bread (in any of its myriad shapes). That means that it must still be functional in a meaningful way, whether that means it will hold its shape when made into rolls, not fall apart if cut into slices from a loaf, or otherwise not be too crumbly.

This in turn constrains the formula of multigrain into something that has a certain minimum amount of gluten, since that is what provides the underlying structure to bread. So, either there must be enough gluten-containing flour in the formula, or else vital wheat gluten needs to be included in the formula.

How is multigrain bread?

OK. So you decided you are going to make multigrain bread. Now you have to decide how you are going to do it.

There are probably two main ways.

  • Mixing the multiple flours together to make a single dough.
  • Making multiple doughs with different flours and then combining them in some way.

Multiple flours

There is probably no particular trick to using multiple flours together, but even here there are opportunities to combine the flours at different times.

In the recipe for Old Milwaukee Rye Bread, some of the rye flour is used to make a pre-ferment.

Breads of this kind include anadama bread.

Multiple doughs

With multiple doughs, you separately prepare two or more doughs and then combine them at the stage where you making up your loaf.

Breads of this kind include marble rye (1, 2).

You can also combine the doughs by creating a braided loaf, in any of several different braiding patterns.

Adding other flavors

Since multigrain breads are often about the flavor of the bread, it is not unusual to add ingredients with strong flavors to multigrain bread.

Molasses is often used in many multigrain recipes.

Many rye bread recipes use caraway seeds (or caraway powder).

In some cases coloring agents are added as well (caramel color for rye breads). These are not strictly necessary for the taste, but sometimes they enhance the visual appeal (kind of like coloring cheddar cheese orange).

Sweet Dough Considered

Let me put out the usual three questions.

  • What is sweet dough?
  • Why is sweet dough?
  • How is sweet dough?

What is sweet dough?

Sweet dough is dough similar to bread dough but with more enrichment than regular bread dough. (It’s not as rich as cake, and it is yeasted.)

Why is sweet dough?

Sweet dough provides a more pleasurable and tasty experience than regular bread. Sweet dough is for fun and celebration, not just for nutrition. Many of the recipes mentioned below and in cookbooks are ethnic holiday or celebration breads. In some cases the ethnicity and holiday is part of the name of the recipe.

How is sweet dough?

Sweet doughs are sweeter, richer, and generally more tender than regular bread doughs. The ingredients include additional sweet flavors (sugar, honey, fruit), enrichments (eggs, butter, oil), and spices (cinnamon, nutmeg, cardamon).

Butter can be included in the dough or laminated with the dough (danish and crossant doughs).

Items made with sweet dough can be in many different shapes, some practical and some more fanciful. In some cases the shape is integral to a traditional bread, or in other cases you can vary the shape according to your own whim.

Applications of Sweet Dough

Sweet dough can be used to make baked goods both large and small, simple or complex, by itself or with fillings and toppings. Different cultures provide numerous examples, but different elements can be combined to produce a myriad of alternatives. Because the number of ingredients and shapes is even larger than for bread dough, there are probably more kinds of baked goods made from sweet dough than bread dough.

In the sections below, I have tried to break down the different applications in a systematic way, and provided links or references to cookbooks for them.

A reference to Fleischmann’s refers to a small cookbook, Fleischmann’s Bake-it-easy Yeast Book, which I found at Half-Price Books years ago. (There is no date or other publication information in it, although it was after the introduction of ZIP codes, and therefore after 1963.) Although Fleischmann’s maintains a major web site devoted to baking with yeast (Breadworld), the web site does not contain all the recipes from the old cookbook.

A reference to BwtSPBC refers to Kim Ode’s Baking with the Saint Paul Bread Club, published in 2006.

A reference to KA200 refers to The King Arthur 200th Anniversary Cookbook, published in 1990.

Loaves Made With Sweet Dough

Breads That Are Just Sweet Dough

These are breads made just from sweet dough that eaten just the way they are.

  • Aunt Anna’s Swedish Rye (BwtSPBC, page 86)
  • Brioche
  • Challah
  • Finnish Cardamon (BwtSPBC, page 57)
  • Holiday Anise Cake (Fleischmann’s, page 8)
  • Holyday Challah (BwtSPBC, page 31)
  • Ooey Gooey Bread (BwtSPBC, page 23)
  • Swedish Rye (BwtSPBC, page 56)

There are places that use a brioche bread that has been artificially dried out as a basis for making French Toast.

Breads That Are Sweet Dough With Additions

The additions are dried fruit or fillings of different kinds.

  • Bee Cake (Fleischmann’s, page 10)
  • Bittersweet Chocolate-Ginger Bread (BwtSPBC, page 138)
  • Cinnamon Bread (Fleischmann’s, page 15)
  • Finnish Easter Bread (Fleischmann’s, page 17)
  • German Christmas Stollen (BwtSPBC, page 62)
  • Jack Horner Plum Cake (Fleischmann’s, page 32)
  • King Cake
  • Panettone
  • Poppy Seed Braid (Fleischmann’s, page 41)
  • Prune Ring (Fleischmann’s, page 34)
  • Sugarplum Bread (BwtSPBC, page 111)
  • Two-Hour Nut Roll (Fleischmann’s, page 6)

Complex Larger Items Made With Sweet Dough

  • Cinnamon Pull-apart Bread (BwtSPBC, page 94)
  • Cinnamon Roll Coffee Cake
  • Cinnamon Twist Coffee Cake (Fleischmann’s, page 46)
  • Family Star Ring (Fleischmann’s, page 45)
  • Fanned Fig Cake (Fleischmann’s, page 38)
  • Glazed Bubble Ring (BwtSPBC, page 105)
  • Hoska
  • Mock Braid
  • Poteca (Fleischmann’s, page 13)
  • Rich Cherry Walnut Coffeecake (Fleischmann’s, page 45)
  • Snail Rolls (BwtSPBC, page 95)
  • Viennese Striesel (Fleischmann’s, page 18)
  • Walnut Potica (BwtSPBC, page 55)

Simple Smaller Items Made With Sweet Dough

Complex Smaller Items Made With Sweet Dough

  • Croissants
  • Eccles Cakes
  • Peanut Butter and Jam Twists (Fleischmann’s, page 31)

Typical Smaller Items Made With Sweet Dough

  • Babas au Rhum (BwtSPBC, page 128)
  • Caramel Pecan Rolls
  • Cinnamon Rolls (BwtSPBC, page 83)
  • Cinnamon Rolls
  • Maple Pecan Rolls (Fleischmann’s, page 33)
  • Rose Rolls (Fleischmann’s, page 9)

Sweet Dough Considerations

What’s different about making baked goods with sweet dough?

There are a few more components to think about. When you make something with sweet dough, you might also have to include some things you don’t need with regular bread.

I would say there are some elements that you don’t have to consider when making regular bread or that are significantly different from regular bread.

  • Formula of the dough (probably more ingredients)
  • Fillings (something rarely needed for bread dough)
  • Shaping (often more complex than regular bread)
  • Topping (unusual for regular bread)

There are significant differences working with the actual sweet dough as compared to bread dough.

  • Sweet dough is not has hospitable to bread yeast, so it rises more slowly.
  • Items made with sweet dough should not generally be sturdy.

Formula of the dough

How do you a sweet dough from a basic bread dough?

Obviously, you add some sweetener.

  • Sugar
  • Brown sugar
  • Honey
  • Maple syrup

So you much do you add? Well, that depends on the recipe.

How do you enrich a sweet dough?

There are some ingredients that are commonly used to enrich sweet dough.

  • Butter
  • Eggs
  • Oils
  • Milk

There are some less common ingredients that will do similar enrichment.

  • Cream or half-and-half
  • Sour cream
  • Powdered milk

So you much do you add? Well, that depends on the recipe.

How do you add flavor to a sweet dough?

Depending on the recipe, there are a variety of additions to flavor the sweet dough.

Spices

  • Anise seeds
  • Ground allspice
  • Ground cardamom
  • Ground cinnamon
  • Ground clove
  • Ground ginger
  • Ground mace
  • Ground nutmeg
  • Powdered saffron

Extracts

  • Almond extract
  • Lemon extract
  • Maple extract
  • Rum extract
  • Vanilla extract

Fruit and fruit products

  • Apple sauce
  • Chopped apricots
  • Chopped candied cherries
  • Chopped dates
  • Chopped maraschino cherries
  • Chopped pitted dried prunes
  • Currants
  • Dried chopped fruit in general
  • Golden raisins
  • Grated lemon peel
  • Grated orange peel
  • Marmalade
  • Orange juice
  • Seedless raisins
  • Sultanas

Nuts

  • Almonds
  • Cashews
  • Peanuts
  • Pecans
  • Walnuts

Fillings

Some breads have shapes that have fillings inside them. The kinds of filling might be determined by tradition (for a cultural or ethnic bread) or by what a particular recipe calls for.

Some examples of fillings that might be used:

  • Almond Filling (KA200, page 204, 206)
  • Apple Filling
  • Cheese Filling (KA200, page 204)
  • Cherry Pie Filling
  • Cinnamon Filling (Fleischmann’s, page 15)
  • Fig Filling (Fleischmann’s, page 38)
  • Lemon Filling (KA200, page 205)
  • Maple Walnut Filling (Fleischmann’s, page 6)
  • Nut Filling (KA200, page 203)
  • Pecan Filling (Fleischmann’s, page 6)
  • Pecan Filling (Fleischmann’s, page 13)
  • Poppy Seed Filling (KA200, page 205)
  • Plum Filling (Fleischmann’s, page 33)
  • Poppy Seed Filling (Fleischmann’s, page 41)
  • Prune Filling (Fleischmann’s, page 35)
  • Vanilla Cream Filling (Fleischmann’s, page 11)

Shaping

When it comes to shaping sweet dough, you will see that baked goods made with sweet dough come in almost any shape except for a normal bread loaf (and even that gets used for cinnamon bread).

Many of the items are made by starting by rolling out the dough into a sheet. (Commercial bakeriers use a piece of equipment called a sheeter for that purpose.)

Once the dough is in a rectangular form, it is covered with some type of filling and then folded or rolled into an intermediate shape. It might be baked as a log, or else cut and reshaped into individual rolls or in a variety of connected shapes.

A sheet can also be cut into smaller pieces, and the individual pieces formed into separate shapes.

Toppings

Some sweet dough items have some kind of topping on them, but many do not. The toppings can be glazes, frostings, washes, or other toppings.

The washes are generally applied before the piece is baked.

You might just see something in the recipe like, “When cool, if desired, drizzle with confectioners’ sugar frosting.”

  • Cinnamon-Sugar Topping
  • Clear Sugar Glaze (KA200, page 207)
  • Confectioners’ Sugar Frosting (Fleischmann’s, page 19)
  • Coconut Topping (Fleischmann’s, page 11)
  • Crumb Topping (Fleischmann’s, page 15)
  • Crumb Topping (Fleischmann’s, page 38)
  • Egg Wash (KA200, page 207)
  • Jelly Glaze (KA200, page 207)
  • Maple Topping (Fleischmann’s, page 34)
  • White Sugar Glaze (KA200, page 207)