White Bread Comparison of Recipes

The time has come to compare the September white breads. I got all the breads out of the freezer and allowed them to come to room temperature. Then I tasted each one.

I decided that my comparison would be on crust, taste and texture.

1. White Mountain Bread: The Bread Bible

• Crust: Soft and easy to bite
• Taste: Slightly salty taste
• Texture: Funny - tore not in half but in a curve. The crumb was nice and had some openness to it.
  

2. Basic White Bread II: The Book of Bread

• Crust: Has character but is easy to bite through. It is a little chewy compared to the first one.
• Taste: Nice full taste, a little sweet and really smells of the honey that is in it.
• Texture: The slice feels moist and substantial. However, this one had huge air holes between the bread and the crust - probably because I let the loaves rise too long.

3. Sands Basic White Bread: The King Arthur Flour 200th Anniversary Cookbook

• Crust: A little tough and chewy. The crust has a lot of body and complements the bread taste
• Taste: A sour-ish flavor with a bit of salt. Tastes like it would make great sandwiches
• Texture; Moist, even crumb

4. White Bread: Variation I: The Bread Baker's Apprentice

• Crust: Most substantial so far but not as tasty as the King Arthur crust
• Taste: Somewhat ordinary taste but wouldn't compete with anything that was on it. Slightly sweet - uses sugar rather than honey
• Texture: Prettiest crumb of all the recipes - tiny holes, nice feel, crust and bread married very well
  

5. Basic White Bread: Sunset Cookbook of Breads

• Crust: Tough, kind of crackles as you chew through it, not very tasty--has a burnt toast feel and flavor to it.
• Taste: Almost no taste - more like store-bought sandwich bread
• Texture: Almost as pretty as the Reinhart bread. Tiny air holes and a feeling of good holding together in the slice.

So now I have to decide my favorite. The Jones' recipe for Basic White Bread II was my very favorite.

I think I like sweeter white breads and this one smelled of the honey in it. This recipe called for 4 T of honey - 1 T more than the other recipes. It was the most moist of the breads and felt good in my mouth.

I also really liked the feel of the crust. I didn't feel disappointed because of the air hole in the crust - I am quite sure that was not the recipe but was rather due to baker error - my leaving the loaf out rising for too long while I hiked a trail!

For sandwiches, I liked the Reinhart (Bread Baker's Apprentice) bread the best. The tiny air holes in the crumb and the feel of the bread were very good. It called for 3 1/4 T of sugar. I think if I had used honey rather than sugar, this one would have been my favorite overall. I also liked the ease of using instant yeast in this bread which none of the other recipes did.

I am very disappointed in the Sunset bread - it really brought nothing new to the table. The King Arthur bread was good, but the crust is what made me put it aside. I liked the taste of it but didn't like the feel of the crust.

Except for the Sunset recipe, I would make all of these recipes again, but I'll give 4 stars to the Book of Bread for their great white bread recipe.

So tomorrow begins the first weekend in October. This month I am baking oatmeal breads. Oatmeal seems like a great way to go into the cool fall.

Although Reinhart doesn't offer an oatmeal bread, I have found five recipes that I will use for my October comparison.

Bread Baker's Apprentice White Bread - Variation 1

As my search for the best plain white bread continues, this week I baked The Bread Baker's Apprentice white bread, variation 1, since it was closest to the other recipes I've used. It is a delicious bread and was relatively quick to put together.

First you put the dry ingredients into the mixer's bowl: flour, salt, powdered milk, sugar and instant yeast. Then you Mix the egg, butter and water together and pour them into the dry ingredients. The mixture comes together quickly - unlike recipes where you first soften the yeast in warm water.



Within a short time, the dough looked like this. I switched to my dough hook and kneaded it in the machine for 6 minutes. Then I kneaded it on the counter for a few minutes more. I did have to add a little flour to create a dough that wasn't too sticky to handle.



The recipe indicates that the dough should rise for 1 1/2 - 2 hours. It's warm in Atlanta and warm in my house, so the dough had doubled in an hour. I then shaped it into loaves and it rose for another hour.

He says to slash the tops of the loaves and fill the slash with olive oil, which I did.

I preheated the oven to 350 and as I headed to the oven with the two risen loaves, would you believe that I dropped one of the pans? It landed on its side and the rise sank. I put the first loaf into the oven. I set the second loaf back on the counter to rise back to its former glory. That happened in about 30 minutes, at which point I put it into the oven as well.



Here's what the loaves looked like straight out of the oven. Below you can see the crumb in a beautiful slice of this bread.



This recipe has no honey in it so it lacks some of the sweet flavor of the previous three loaves. However as a sandwich bread, it will be the perfect vehicle for any type of filling. Also it made great "Toad in the hole" for me for breakfast this morning!

Basic White Bread II - Part Two

Having turned the bread dough out of the container, I cut it in half with the bench knife and patted out a rectangular shape of sorts! Then I rolled it into a loaf. Of course, you repeat this with the second half.



I put these rolled loaves into 8 1/2 inch pans to rise. I made the mistake of getting distracted and forgetting the bread, so it rose a little higher than it should have before putting it into the oven (350 degrees for 40 minutes).

The finished loaf is pretty but the far end of the loaf is an obvious air bubble below the surface - probably the result of my leaving it rising for too long. It smells great because of the honey in the bread.



This bread cut open shows the air bubble. The authors say that this version of their white bread will be both somewhat sweet because of the honey and not as compact as either a bread recipe without the sweetener or one that starts with a sponge. It does taste sweeter than the first white bread I made but I don't like the "crumb" as well.

For a listen into what the "crumb" of the bread means, watch this video of Peter Reinhart on Ted.com.



So far I like the Hensperger bread better - the crumb was better and the taste, while not sweet, felt more wholesome to me.

Anadama Bread - not BBA Challenge but My Effort

The BBA Challenge looked so interesting to me so I decided to try the first recipe in Peter Reinhart's Bread Baker's Apprentice like the challenge participants did in May when they began. So this weekend while I was deciding how to be inspired for baking going forward, I baked the first bread - the Anadama bread.

The name, by the way, of the bread is supposedly because a fisherman got tired of his wife constantly serving him cornbread and molasses, so he tossed in some yeast and said, "Anna, damn her." At least that is the version that Wikipedia offers!

I put the dough to rise in a straight sided Tupperware container (as per Beth Hensperger - see post earlier). It rose beautifully.



Then I patted the dough into a long rectangle and shaped my loaves. I use my fingertips to seal the roll to the dough remaining below it to assure a pretty slice.



Here's the bread just out of the oven. The recipe says to spray the loaves with water and sprinkle them with cornmeal before baking. I don't have a spray bottle up here in the mountains so I used a pastry brush and brushed a little water on both loaves. Then I sprinkled them with local cornmeal, ground at the Hambidge Center's grist mill.



The bread smelled great, sliced really pretty and tastes wonderful. It's sweet from the molasses but not too sweet and has a little crunch from the cornmeal.