After receiving a nifty pullman pan for Christmas, I was so excited to see pain de mie on the January list for Mellow Bakers...and now here we are in February, and toast bread shows up: another pullman pan bread!
I'd never heard of toast bread, but apparently it's an English bread and is similar to last month's pain de mie. From what I noticed, they are different in that the toast bread has no powdered milk, less butter, and the addition of malt powder.
This was the most stressful bread I've made in a long time! Actually, it was a very easy recipe, but the batteries in my scale went out just as I was in the middle of pouring in the flour. Grrrrr. Luckily, I was able to jiggle the batteries a bit and get them to weigh the flour after a bit. But then I had to add all of the other ingredients by measuring instead of weighing.
The bread included bread flour, high gluten flour (which I didn't have, so I just added some vital wheat gluten to my bread flour), instant yeast, unsalted butter, water, salt, and malt powder. It's all mixed together and folded once during it's first proof. Then into the tin and then into the oven.
I still didn't get the perfect pullman corners. As with the pain de mie, I used 2 1/2 pounds of dough, but this time I let it rise a lot longer...probably an extra hour. The dough was a little under an inch from the top when I put it in. I guess next time I'll try a bit more dough and a longer proofing time.
I think I prefer last month's recipe, but I still really enjoyed this bread. We'll use it for grilled cheese sandwiches and eggs in a nest this week. And it made wonderful pb&j for a quick lunch this afternoon!
UPDATE: Hubby said that this bread made the absolute best grilled cheese sandwich he'd ever had in his life.
Oh, eggs in a nest sound really good this morning, we are iced in for the time being. Your bread looks wonderful. That pan is on my list as you all are having such fun with it and the bread looks so wonderful. I want to play with one, too!
ReplyDeleteYour pullman loaf looks very good!! The corners will come with practice. If I get my pullman pan soon, maybe I'll try January's recipe first, since you say you liked it better. Grilled cheese is wonderful when it's cold outside!
ReplyDeleteSo funny you've never heard of toast bread before - my kids LOVE Toastbrot (toast bread). I look forward to making this one!
ReplyDeleteAh those corners, you'll get the hang of it. They look beautiful to me! Love them too grilled with cheese!!
ReplyDeleteThis does it. I AM buying myself a pain de mie pan when I move back to my home WITH a regular size oven! :-)
ReplyDeleteI'm sooo jealous of the Mellow Bakers now...
Curiously enough I have never seen a loaf of bread labelled in England as 'toast bread' in a shop. But the malt powder is a very traditional ingredient in a typical English white bread. We have lots of malted grain breads too, it's a popular flavour for bread. English breads used to have names like 'bloomer' and 'split tin' and 'high top' and many more, but that dates back to the pre plastic bag bread days. Now they are all branded, with names like Mighty White... Anyway, wonderful that your hubbie liked the bread! I let the bread rise till it's about half an inch from the top last time, you're almost there! And it looks soo good from where I'm sitting :)
ReplyDeleteLooks great! I love using the pullman pan. Looking forward to this one.
ReplyDeleteI still need to get a pullman pan. I'm waiting, since my birthday is coming in a week. If no one else gets me one, I'm buying it for myself! =) Grilled cheese is definitely a good way to measure the success of a sandwich bread. =)
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