Fear and Loaving in St. Louis - Cinnamon Bread Sans Raisins

Here is a corny intro into bread stolen from Alton Brown. (Apologies for the end of this video, that stupid digital camera won't turn off after you start it!)

Well, it started off ok. All the ingredients were there, a little inspiration from a culinary giant, and we are off. Stacie and I shared some Plugras butter and some nice organic suger. The suger tasted like very very light brown suger, some molassas was still around. The granules were a little bigger than that of normal granulated suger, so I ground it a bit in my food processor until I got a similar granulation. I did not use raisins or any other dried fruits because I am not a fan.

Things started off with the activation of the yeast in my warm milk. I don't think it was too warm, but it was warm to the touch. My worry is that I killed off some prospective CO2 belchin' comrades in action. This is absolutely sticky stuff. If I were to do it again, I'd research this part specifically to make sure my yeast was successfully awoken.




I started by adding the yeast slurry, sugar, salt, and milk, then slowly added the flour. Slowly.





First Facepalm. At that point, I realized I totally forgot the Plugras.  The dough was just about done, just looking a little dry.  Adding butter to a dough mass proved difficult, but a few minutes of folding and using the mixer, all appeared well.  Hopefully its not a catastrophic failure yet.






After a bit of kneading with my bread hook, it finally reached a smooth, elastic dough.

As you can see from my neato time-lapse techology, at the end of the fermentation the bread grew only a little.  All that really happened occurred under the hood, just some good ol' autolyse'in going on.


Second Facepalm. There was no excess gas when I pressed down on the dough. I hoped that it wouldn't be too tough in the end. I rolled the dough out into a quasi-rectanglular shape for my egg wash down. My high school math teacher would hunt me down if I said that was a polygram.


After spreading the egg wash and adding the suger/cinnamon mixture, I rolled the rectangle up. Not sure I flattened the dough out enough with the rolling pin because when I attempted to roll it up, it felt like I only folded it in half.





Third Facepalm. After another episode of Watch

Paint Dry
the Dough Rise about a 55 minute proof outside in the 80° humid St. Louis climate, the dough rose about 1/4 of its original size. Fail?


Here is the loaf with its Egg-Wash on top, I added a little more of the sugar/cinnamon mix to the top.


This was the bread with about 15 minutes to go in the bake.



Here is the finished product from many angles. Looks like a success, we shall taste.


As you can see from this shot, the roll is pretty terrible, the man responsible for this has been fired.
The bread was dense and lacked a cinnamon flavor other than the 1/3 that had the roll.

All in all, I could have done a few things better. Doing some things in order, doing a better job of rolling the dough and letting it proof UNTIL it reaches double volume. If I would have done those things, I think it would have been a little better. I would try going a little off script next time, I might possibly add the raisins very early, as Tom noted, so they disentegrate. After tasting Stacie's and Corrina's loaves, the raisins add something to the cinnamon flavor that mine lacked. I might also set a controlled oven proof as well, so that the yeast is a little more happy and in the future, I could replicate the process with little issue.

For my first attempt at baking, I was happy that something slightly edible came out. I will take Lori's suggestion and fry up some French Toast with the remainder this week. That'll do pig. That'll do.