Loafing Around

So as I do every second week, I made a new batch of bread.

This time I apparently decided to make the loaves slightly too long, so they ended up a bit squiggly, but that's beside the point.

I used largely the same recipe as usual, but as a bit of a change I decided to try the yudane method. This is where you set aside about 5-10% of the flour and mix it 1:5 with boiling water (also set aside from the original recipe, not added on to it). The recipe I use calls for roughly 500g of flour and 170g of water (more water comes from the eggs, which isn't useful right now), and so that limited me to 34g of flour if I used all the water for the yudane. This was about 7% of the total flour, a perfectly reasonable amount.

Anyway, this yudane mixture is just incorporated into the dough with the rest of the ingredients, and everything else proceeds as normal.

The bread came together quite nicely and the dough was noticeably firmer and easier to handle when kneading and rolling, which is a nice bonus.

The real test, though, is the texture and shelf life. The yudane is supposed to improve the texture, making it softer and more pillowy, as well as increase the shelf life before that texture starts to go hard and stale.

I ate the bread as I normally do throughout the week, and largely I came away impressed. The texture was quite good, and it wasn't until Friday that I noticed the bread starting to go a bit stale. I probably could have toasted that last slice, and perhaps for this week's loaf I'll do just that.

In all, I'd say this experiment was a success.