Homemade Wonder Bread from Bravetart
What went well:
The bread has a fantastic texture.
It tastes wonderful (get it?).
It works well in a variety of traditional bready applications.
What went poorly:
It’s impossible to find malted milk powder.
The loaf split.
The bread killed my rubber spatula.
After great (and delicious) success with a number of the recipes in Stella Parks’ Bravetart, I was deeply intrigued by her recipe for homemade Wonder Bread. A cursory reading of the recipe indicated that it shouldn’t be too difficult. The intro for it claims you can get the loaf finished in under four hours including the time it takes for the bread to cool. Having recently made Joanne Chang’s brioche recipe (which took several days), this seemed mercifully quick.
About a week after I discovered the recipe, I got home early from work one day and decided it was the day. Unfortunately, the recipe calls for malted milk powder, and it turns out that this is impossible to buy in person. I went to four different grocery stores that day, and none of them had it. Defeated, I conceded that perhaps it was not the day.
For the next few weeks, I looked for malted milk powder at every grocery store I went to. Even going out of my way to try and find one that would carry this elusive treasure. After looking at 10+ different grocery stores, I caved and bought it on Amazon. I felt ridiculous ordering a giant tub of malted milk powder online and I feel ridiculous now telling you that I did this. But I really wanted to make this bread and that’s what it calls for, so ridiculous online procurement it is.
A few days later, the malted milk powder arrived! I dashed to my apartment and quickly got to work putting it in the cabinet where I promptly forgot about it for two months. You know the opening scene of Fellowship of the Ring when Isildur loses the ring and it waits to be found? It was kind of like that (minus all the orcs and battle).
You see, we had guests coming over the day it arrived. So I had purged our kitchen counter of all non-essential items to create the illusion that we live in some sort of home furnishings magazine. In my haste, I stuffed the precious ingredient deep into the back of an upper cabinet, where it lay in wait for me to rediscover it.
Two months pass.
I was rummaging around for 00 flour when low and behold, I grabbed a mysterious can from the back of the cabinet. “Oh? What’s this?” I said to myself, “Oh right! The malted milk powder that was impossible to find!” The discovery immediately re-energized me and I dashed to Bravetart to see if I had the other ingredients.
Miraculously, barring 12 oz of whole milk, I had everything I needed. I ran out to the grocery store and quickly got to work, which brings us here.
So, how do you make this thing?
Like all things, I started by measuring out the ingredients. They don’t look too imposing when they’re listed, but when they’re all measured out it does seem like rather a lot for a loaf of white bread. Though that may just be my ignorance about what it takes to make bread.
This bread starts with a rather strange step which is to make a roux out of flour and whole milk. It’s not that making a roux is an unusual activity in itself, but in the context of bread making this was definitely a surprise for me.
Fortunately, this was pretty easy. You just heat the two things together and stir. Simple.
In the recipe it says that the final result should have some resemblance of mashed potatoes and I’ve got to say, that’s a dead on description of what it looks like.
When your mashed potatoes are ready, it’s time for the first waiting period of many in this recipe. The roux comes out quite hot and needs to cool to 120 degrees Fahrenheit per the recipe.
After about five minutes, the temperature had only come down a few degrees and I was getting tired of waiting. I threw the whole bowl into the fridge for a bit and it came down to 120 pretty quickly. I can’t comment on whether putting the roux in the fridge was a good idea or not.
With an appropriately cool roux, the next step is to combine everything. When I say everything, I mean everything. All of it goes into the bowl of a stand mixer.
It says to mix things together a bit before transferring to the mixer. I don’t know if this hand mixing step is necessary, but I folded things together until this lumpy mass appeared.
When everything is combined-ish, you let a stand mixer take over.
Now, if you’re stupid like me, you won’t think that the stand mixer is doing a very good job and you’ll want to poke the dough a bit. If you do it while the stand mixer is running, it turns out this is actually a great way to break your only decent rubber spatula.
R.I.P.
(In other news, I am now accepting spatula donations.)
After a pretty long time kneading, you’re supposed to do the “bubble gum test”. For this, you’re supposed to cut off a small lump of dough and then slowly stretch it into a disk. If it gets really, really thin and then pops like bubble gum (hence the name), then the dough is ready. If it tears in half or forms a jagged hole then the dough hasn’t formed enough structure and you need to knead more.
When I first did this test, it definitely needed more time. The second time I did it, I realized I had no idea what I was actually doing and so maybe it was fine. I called it and moved on. Since then, I’ve glimpsed some advice on Reddit that suggests to knead on a speed closer to medium than low. I made this bread a second time and that advice is definitely true.
The bread needs to proof in a warm spot, so Stella suggests that you heat up a mug full of water in the microwave until it’s boiling to create a warm spot in your kitchen. My advice for this is DON’T FILL THE MUG ALL THE WAY. As you can just make out in the picture below, it boiled vigorously and I got water all over my microwave.
One quick cleanup later and the dough was in with the water to proof.
You’re supposed to proof until you can leave a shallow impression if you give the dough a gentle poke. The recommended 30 minutes worked for me and I got a nice little impression.
When the first proofing is complete, it’s time to shape the loaf and put it in a pan. For this, you’re supposed to make an 8 inch by 8 inch square and then fold the square like a chunky business letter. If you don’t send a lot of business letters (because it’s 2020 and who is still sending letters?), you just fold the thing into thirds.
As you can see, I made a very mediocre square and it didn’t fold up into a very nice letter, so I just kinda folded it over on itself and call it a day.
You then take your chunky bundle and fold it in half again, to the best of your ability, before dumping it into your prepared baking pan. You can see that mine wasn’t perfectly even, but I thought this was fine and kept moving.
Once in the pan, you need to proof again. I rewarmed my mug, but dumped out a bit of water to avoid cleaning the microwave a second time.
You’re supposed to proof until the bread “crowns the pan”. If I’m being honest with you, I had no idea what that meant. After the recommended proofing time, the bread had risen above the pan so I took that to mean it had “crowned”. It turns out that’s not quite right. You want it to proof to almost what you want it to look like when you bake it. The more you know!
I put the loaf in the oven and let it go until it had puffed up nicely.
Tick tock tick tock
You can tell I definitely didn’t let it proof long enough, because I got an absolutely massive split in my bread. However, the crust’s color is gorgeous. I believe the technical term is “a nutty brown”.
To check that it was done, I inserted a thermometer to see if it was over 200 degrees Fahrenheit. This worked well as far as telling if it was done, but it does leave you with a small little hole in the top. In hindsight, I should have gone through the side or somewhere less noticeable than directly on top.
Here you can see my tear along with how my inadequate bread shaping skills left the loaf with a bit of a butt.
The texture of the bread was great! But you can see that I had a little band of denseness as a result of under proofing (or so I assume).
The real question, of course, is how does it taste? I’m pleased to say that it makes a very delicious loaf of white bread! It was great for all of your normal white bread applications.
It makes a fantastic BLT.
Works delightfully for eggs-in-a-basket (aka toad in a hole). Full disclosure, this is using bread from a second loaf I made.
And of course, if makes an absolutely dynamite PB&J. Especially if you pan fry the bread first.
Would I make it again? Yes! In fact, I already have. Would I recommend that you make it? Yes! It’s not that hard once you know what you’re looking for. And compared to other breads that need 700 days to proof, this one is pretty quick.
I’m sure that I’ll make this bread many more times, I just need to go buy a new rubber spatula.