I know that the in thing is to be making sour-dough, ciabatta and the like - anything but a sliced white sandwich loaf, but there's times when it's nice to have just a plain white slice of bread. I like it for toast, bacon butties and cheese and pickle sarnies in particular.
I've always used a variant of my 'Daily Bread' recipe for this purpose. However, I'm on a diet and want to reduce the amount of oil I use, but still have a loaf that has good keeping qualities.
I stumbled across hat I think mat be the answer online: a Water Roux or Tangzhong Roux. It's a simple process that makes a very light loaf that has good keeping qualitites.
My base recipe (In baker's percentages) was:
White Bread Flour 100%
water 64%
'Instant' dried yeast 1.4% (The stuff you mix in with the flour and don't need to rehydrate)
Salt 1.4%
Veg oil 3%
In real life, for two small loaves:
500gm flour
320gm water
7gm yeast
7gm salt
1T Oil
It's the method that varies.
Take 5% of the flour from the 500gm and mix it with 5 times its weight in water taken from the 320gm. That's 25gm of flour and 125gm water, mixed and then heated to 65°C (149°F). I did this in the microwave. You then proceed as normal adding the roux with the rest of the water after checking that they're not too hot.
Being a pendant, I weighed my bowl of flour and water pre and post microwave and made up the 5gm loss with water.
Has anyone any experiences to share of this method?
Phil