Fun with bread

On social media a couple of weeks ago I shared this photo of a bread loaf I made in our breadmaker. A friend wanted the recipe, though I've never tried transferring a breadmaker recipe to a hand-made version, it probably would work okay.

Thus, the ingredients are as follows:

450g bread flour

30g sugar

30g butter

12g skim milk powder

9g salt

340ml water

2.8g yeast

My guess would be that you combine the yeast, sugar, and water and leave it till it froths (about five minutes?). Then add that to the rest of the dry ingredients and knead for a while. Then leave it to rise for an hour and knead it again and leave another hour then bake. I'm really guessing here, but an intelligent guess based on this recipe I've successfully used for bread rolls.

I was on a MYOB (make your own bread) streak for a while a couple of years ago, I documented some of that in this blog post. That was mostly fancy stuff, not the basic loaves that I've been making recently.

The truth of the matter is that Japanese bread, in our opinion, is quite sweet and lacking in substance. In more recent years you've been able to buy non-white bread, but it's quite expensive when you're feeding hungry teenage boys. So we generally make our own and we love it.

Last year a colleague passed on to me the legendary OMF German Bread recipe (apparently any Japan OMFer worth their salt as a baker has this...). This one is super easy, with no kneading required. It's also very yummy, with some nice crunchy bits in it.

German Bread Recipe

500g white bread flour

1 cup brown flour

1/2 cup rolled oats

1/2 cup sunflower seeds

a handful of chopped nuts or other things like pumpkin seeds

2 teaspoons of sugar

2 teaspoons of salt

3 teaspoons of dry yeast

3 cups of lukewarm water

largish dash of oil

A slice of German bread. Small, but yummy!

Method

1. Mix the dry ingredients well. 

2. Add water and oil and mix well.

3. Let it sit to rise for 30 minutes.

4. Stir lightly.

5. Fill two tins.

6. Leave to rise for 10-15 minutes.

7. Bake at 190˚C for 50 minutes.

German bread before

German bread after

Oh, and I haven't made bread rolls for some time. I should get around to that again. Bread rolls in grocery stores are also pretty new in Japan—we're seeing them more and more here—and they're getting bigger. Until recently you've only been able to buy tiny dinner rolls and even then not in every grocery store. By the way, since I did that blog post I linked to above about bread rolls, I've discovered that if you bake them with an oven tray on top, that keeps them nice and flat, great for burgers.

Now this has made me hungry . . . I'd better get on with making dinner soon (and hope that it's not as disastrous as last nights was!).