Here's a trick to make your regular old white bread recipe really pop: Add tea!
I usually do this in a bread machine, since I can put it on an overnight timer, so the tea has plenty of time to steep. It's good in other bread dough too.
I usually do this in a bread machine, since I can put it on an overnight timer, so the tea has plenty of time to steep. It's good in other bread dough too.
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Signing UpStep 1: Ingredients
Use your regular white bread recipe. If you're using a bread machine, it probably came with a recipe.
Most of these call for:
-Flour
-Oil (not pictured)
-Water (not pictured)
-Sugar
-Salt
-Yeast
I add: tea! Some kind of fine bagged tea, ideally one with a lot of flavor. Pumpkin ginger is good, chocolate teas, etc. My favorite is pomegranate black tea.
For proportionality, my recipe uses 4c flour, and I put in 2 bags of tea.
Most of these call for:
-Flour
-Oil (not pictured)
-Water (not pictured)
-Sugar
-Salt
-Yeast
I add: tea! Some kind of fine bagged tea, ideally one with a lot of flavor. Pumpkin ginger is good, chocolate teas, etc. My favorite is pomegranate black tea.
For proportionality, my recipe uses 4c flour, and I put in 2 bags of tea.
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Barm
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Barm is the foam, or scum, formed on the top of liquor (i.e. fermented alcoholic beverages such as beer or wine, or feedstock for hard liquor or industrial ethanol distillation) when fermenting. It was used to leaven bread, or set up fermentation in a new batch of liquor. Barm, as a leaven, has also been made from ground millet combined with must out of wine-tubs[1] and is sometimes used in English baking as a synonym for a natural leaven.[2] Various cultures derived from barm, usually Saccharomyces cerevisiae, became ancestral to most forms of brewer's yeast and baker's yeast currently on the market.
In parts of the North-West of England and throughout Yorkshire, a barm or barm cake is a common term for a soft, floury bread roll, on menus in chip shops there is often an option of a chip barm (which consists of chips within a bread roll). This is a regional term: other areas describe an identical roll as a "bap", "bread bun", "bread cake","batch", "blaa" (Ireland) or many other variants. It is applied equally to yeast-leavened bread, without implying the use of sourdough or barm leavens.
In Ireland, barm is used in the traditional production of barmbrack, a fruited bread.
Barmbrack
Barmbrack is a traditional Irish spicy fruit bread and a favourite accompaniment to afternoon tea. It is delicious sliced, toasted and buttered - or you can eat it on its own. (Traditionally tea is used instead of water but I prefer water as I am sensitive to the tannin in tea.) Similar to the Welsh bara brith, it's easily available in bakeries and supermarkets in Ireland and Britain. It's also quite easy to make at home, although you do need to plan ahead to allow time for the dough to rise.
Don't be tempted by inferior barmbrack recipes that use self-raising flour or baking soda. Barmbrack is essentially a yeasted bread (barm is another name for fermented yeast). Recipes that call for chemical raising agents will be quicker, but not nearly as good.
This recipe makes 2 medium sized loaves but it could easily be used for flat tea cakes or buns.
1. In the evening the day before you want your Barmbrack mix the following in a BIG bowl, cover with plastic and leave overnight in a warm place:
3 cups white flour (all purpose or bread making flour)
2 tsp instant dried yeast
3 cups warm water or warm milk (or warm tea)
2. Next day, grease/butter 2 loaf tins, then
3. Add: ¼ cup dark brown sugar to the overnight mix and stir to dissolve. The overnight mix will likely have a gluey lump of dough sitting on a puddle of watery liquid. That is normal and makes dissolving the sugar easier.
Then add 1 large egg (beaten)
4. Premix and then add:
3 cups flour (could be white or whole wheat or some of each)
2½ tsp mixed spice (cinnamon, ginger, ground cloves or what you have)
1½ cups raisins
1 cup currants (or use more raisins instead)
½ cup glace cherries (cut up)
5. Add: ¼ cup oil (olive, sunflower, canola etc)
6. Pre-heat to 350F (180C).
7. Mix everything together with your hands using some extra flour if necessary, until you have one good homogenous ‘lump’ of dough. Knead for a few minutes then divide into 2 equal sized pieces and shape / roll to fit your bread tins. Press down and leave to rise in a warm place until at least doubled in size.
8. Bake for 45 mins. Test if done by tapping on the bottom: it should sound hollow. Allow to cool on a wire rack.
9. When you remove the bread from the oven, immediately brush it over with a sugar/milk mixture to give it a glossy glaze.
Note: During the overnight stage the yeast acts on the flour and develops the gluten into that chewy elastic stage which holds the air bubbles. During the overnight stage it is too runny to overflow the bowl, but when the extra flour is added it thickens it up and with minimum kneading it is suitable for its final rising in the tin.
Sherry
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I've put it into hand-kneaded doughs, too, and it works great either way.