snadblog

I’ve done the experiments I promised back when I talked about to make the easiest bread ever. The results were very encouraging!

I made two loaves of no-knead beer bread — one using a Tastefully Simple box mix and one using a 2-ingredient, from-scratch recipe. My objective was to see how closely the two matched in texture, flavor, and ease of preparation.

First, let me tell detail my ingredients.

For the box mix, I used one box of Tastefully Simple’s Bountiful Bread mix. The only ingredient I had to add to the mix was a 12-oz bottle of beer.

For the scratch recipe, I used the following:

1. 2 2/3 cups regular flour
   4 tsp baking powder
   1 tsp kosher salt
   (Or you can replace all three of these ingredients with 2 2/3 cups self-rising flour)
2. 1/4 cup sugar
3. 1 12-oz bottle of beer

For both loaves, I used Negro Modella beer because it’s what I had on hand.

I stirred all ingredients together and the process looked identical for both batches. I poured each batter into a lightly greased loaf pan and baked them at 375 degrees F for 50-55 minutes.

The resulting loaves looked almost exactly the same in the pans and sliced. The texture was essentially identical as well. In both of these photos, the “mix” bread is on the left (in the metal pan) and the “scratch” bread is on the right (in the glass pan). The “scratch” loaf is a little shorter, but I think that’s because the glass pan is a little wider than the metal one.

So what about the taste, right? First, the Negro Modella made a fine addition and both breads had a great flavor. There was actually only one noticeable difference in taste between the two — the “mix” bread was sweeter. WAY sweeter. I had added 1/4 cup of sugar to my “scratch” recipe to attempt to account for the sugar I saw on the box mix’s ingredients label, but I undershot it. It would take at least 1/2 cup and possibly 3/4 cup of sugar to make the “scratch” recipe equal the sweetness of the mix. The real question is, do you WANT to equal it? I’ve tasted both breads several times today (I can’t stop snacking on it!) and there are benefits to both. The sweeter one tastes great with cream cheese on it and feels more like a sweet snack. The other one tastes more like a meal and would be good accompanying other food. I’d say it’s a matter of personal tastes to determine how much sugar a person should use. I may do 1/2 cup next time for a nice middle ground.

So the experiment was a complete success; I’m confident that I’ve faithfully reproduced the Tastefully Simple bread (if I add more sugar, anyway), and I am very pleased with the resulting bread. And it’s just SO EASY! I recommend you make some when you’ve got a spare 10 minutes :)

I have not yet tried with other beverages besides beer, but I’ll let you know if I do.

On another yummy bread front, I made some Chubble last week, following a recipe posted by the glorious Mrs. Marv. The bread took a while to make — certainly a LOT longer than the beer bread — but the results were droolingly yummy, and it had a high yield (2 loaves) that made the extra effort worth it.

I used her recipe exactly as specified and the result was a highly flavorful, herby and cheesy bread that pulled apart into perfect little nibble-able bites that were fluffy in the middle and covered in goodness all around. I am now eager to try it with other combinations of cheese and herbs, and I also want to try adding bacon as one of her readers suggested. The combinations are endless. Maybe I’ll bring some to the next party I attend :)

This entry was posted on Monday, November 26th, 2007 at 6:02 pm and is filed under All, Food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.