Irish-Style Brown Bread

[jayfurr]

So on Friday I bought some Irish-Style Wholemeal Flour at the King Arthur Flour store in Norwich, Vermont. It came with a recipe on the back for an Irish-style brown bread, made with baking soda and baking powder instead of yeast. I've made soda bread in the past, just not using that specific kind of flour, and figured I'd have no trouble.

Well, I followed the instructions to the letter and got a dough that was still moderately sticky. Sticky in the sense of "I sprayed my hands with PAM before going to lift it out of the bowl because otherwise I'd have had a huge mess." I considered adding more flour but was afraid that if I went too far in that direction the resulting loaf would be really, really dry. Sometimes specialty flours keep on absorbing liquid and if you don't allow for that you get bricks.

I baked it per instructions in my GE convecting oven. I could have used the non-convection setting but have found that in general convection baking results in a more evenly baked loaf.

The resulting loaf was a bit of a disappointment. It did wind up moderately dry and a bit crumbly. I don't know if it might have benefited from a shorter bake -- I used an instant-read thermometer to measure the internal temperature when I thought it looked like it was getting done (with five minutes left on the timer) and found that it read only 156 Fahrenheit so left it in for the full bake cycle.

Here's what it looks like (click the photo once, then click again to fully enlarge it):



I'm a bit perplexed. With dough so gloppy, I really wasn't expecting such a dry loaf. My main theory at this time is that I should have stopped the baking sooner, and never mind what the instant-read thermometer said. I'm also a bit surprised that the dough was so sticky. Should I have added flour until it felt more like ordinary bread dough? Should I have baked for a shorter period of time? I'm just not sure at this point. The loaf tastes okay -- it's good warmed up with a bit of butter -- but I'd like to know what I could do to get a less crumbly loaf, if anyone has any brilliant ideas.

Comments

[qwrrty.livejournal.com]

I'm still working on understanding more about the chemistry of baking. I've often had this problem and am still not sure about what to do about it.

However, I'm starting to think that the answer is to let it rise longer if the dough is really wet. Reason: if there's a lot of moisture in the dough, it will evaporate quickly once the dough is in the oven and not really help you a lot. Letting it rise longer will allow the liquid more time to permeate the grain and give you a softer bread.

I haven't actually read anything to confirm that, but the results seem to be consistent with the baking I've done recently.

[jayfurr.livejournal.com]

A year or so ago I bought a book titled How Baking Works: Exploring the Fundamentals of Baking Science (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0471747238?ie=UTF8&tag=furrsorg-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0471747238), which turned out to be an actual textbook for use in a baking class in a culinary school. It was invaluable. I recommend it highly.

That being said, you're spot-on about longer rise times for moist dough. It helps also to know how absorbent the flour you're working with is. The high-gluten Sir Lancelot flour absorbs more liquid and you have to up the liquid content of your recipe if you're converting from a recipe using standard flour.

In the case of this brown bread, though, there was no rise time. It was a soda/powder bread. :)

[qwrrty.livejournal.com]

THE PLOT THICKENS.

(Thanks for the book rec! Sounds perfect.)

[qwrrty.livejournal.com]

Oh, and the King Arthur store? Made of win. A couple of years ago I took omegabeth there for her birthday, to do some shopping at the outlet store and take a pastry baking class. It was many kinds of awesome and I want to do it again someday.

[jhvilas.livejournal.com]

Yeah, prolly the flout requires adjustments. I've only made Irish soda bread once, and that was over 20 years ago. I can't remember what its issues were, but I do remember that I didn't see much need to make it again. Maybe it just comes out the way you made it (although I imagine I was using all-purpose flour). Maybe there's an Irish baker out there who can enlighten us.

[trom.livejournal.com]

Dry bread is a notorious problem with convection ovens, rather then reduce the cooking time, lower the oven temp by about 25^F. That usually helps.

[jayfurr.livejournal.com]

My convection oven actually helps with that by automatically heating to 25 degrees less than the temperature set, for precisely the reason you indicated. :)