White Sandwich Bread

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I continue my quest to become a better bread baker and tame the yeast beast. My latest achievement was to bake white sandwich bread (wonderbread). This bread will be useful for making grilled cheese, deli sandwiches, and plain toast.

I followed the King Arthur Flour recipe and it was pretty successful. The only hiccup is that the dough proofed very quickly, due to the warm kitchen.

Learnings

Dough Hydration

One note I liked was that the recipe notes explains explains the variability of hydration. Their take was that flour can be more or less hydrated based on humidity levels. It’s something I’ve noticed, where my doughs were always stickier than expected and didn’t seem to absorb as much. Living in Bay Area, things are probably on the more humid side of things, than compared to continental U.S. This is something that’s taken me awhile to learn to adjust for. On average, I either need to assume a cup of flour is 140 g or hold back about 10% less liquid to begin with.

Dough Smoothness

I kneaded the dough in a stand mixer but after 20 minutes, I gave up. I was expecting the dough to come together into a smooth ball but it remained a bit rough and straggly by the end. The dough had a lot of gluten, though, but never smoothed out. Not wanting to overwork the dough, I stopped it there.

The lack of smoothness might be due to the enriched dough, with sugars and fats affecting the dough’s behaviour. But overmixing the dough can lead to a tough sandwich bread. I figured since this was sandwich bread, the importance of smooth ball of dough was less crucial.

Adjusting Proofing Times

My kitchen was very warm and the dough proofed very quickly. It was done the first rise in 60 minutes and the second one in 40 minutes. Generally, you don’t want too quick of a rise, as that indicates too much yeast was used and the end product might taste yeastier than desired.

The dough was very airy and immediately deflated as soon as I poked it. After shaping it, it still rose very quickly. I put the dough in the oven sooner than recipe stated, to avoid it having too much rise and over-inflating. This would likely cause it to be weak and collapse during baking, which would make it dense and gummy.

Since the proof was too rapid, I also made sure to score the loaf (not mentioned in the recipe directions). I figured that scoring the loaf would at least control any bursting due to oven-spring.

Soft Crust

Sandwich bread has the characteristic soft crust. This is achieved by applying a butter wash before and after baking.

If the loaf is browning too quickly, tin-foil should be used to cover the loaf half-way through baking. This limits radiation energy from speeding up browning on the crust. It also traps moisture, which keeps the crust from drying out and getting hard.

White Sandwich Bread:

This recipe is adapted from King Arthur Flour. I corroborated the technique and ingredients along with a similar recipe from Ethan Chelbowski.

Recipe

Ingredient Baker’s Percentage Weight for 1 lb loaf pan (g)
Flour 100% 360
Water or Milk 65% 235
Butter (melted) 6% 20
Honey or Sugar 6% 20
Yeast 1.5% 5
Salt 2% 7

Note

Yeast is 7 g == 2.25 tsp.

The yeast was very vigorous in my warm kitchen (25 C). Consider using less yeast and allowing a longer rise (maybe 70%).

Technique

  1. Mix everything in a stand mixer. The dough should be smooth (not sticky) and very soft when done, >10 minutes. Alternatively, knead by hand. This will require slap and fold technique.
  2. Rise dough for 60-90 minutes.
  3. Punch down dough and pat out into a rectangle. Envelop fold and roll into a tight log. Be sure to tighten and seal the seam.
  4. Put dough into a greased and floured pan. Allow to rise for 45 minutes.
  5. Preheat oven to 350F (175C).
  6. Bake for 40 minutes. When crust starts getting brown, cover with tin foil. Bread is done when at 195-200F.
  7. Remove from rack after 5 minutes. Cool on rack completely before bagging away.

Sourdough Tangzhong

The Perfect Loaf has a similar recipe that uses both sourdough starter and tangzhong.

The tangzhong is typical conversion, which is to make tangzhong with 10% of the flour and 4:1 ratio with liquid.

The sourdough component is typical, with a levain and autolyze stage. After that, the bulk fermentation is just you cooking. 3 stretch and folds over the course of 2 hours to build gluten.

Another note is that I used 450 g of flour and this filled out the whole loaf pan, with a beautiful crown. 360 g doesn’t rise above the loaf pan.