Magic Bread

My eyes love shiny stuff and anything with the word magic magically draws me in. When I was making The Sultanas of Plait in this post, I came across a few blog posts on other books by Alex Goh and one of the books was "Magic Bread".  I had to make it! I looked up the library but I couldn't find any English versions of the book. The elusiveness of the book made me ever more determined to make the magic bread. A number of blogs had published the magic bread recipe and today I gave it a go. I kinda followed this blog's recipe.

gelatinised dough

sponge dough

The magic bread has to be made the night before you make the actual dough. First you need to make a gelatinised dough which is just mixing boiling water with flour. The other thing is a sponge dough which is just a small amount of flour, water and yeast mixed together. Both are kept refrigerated overnight.

I don't fully understand the science behind the gelatinised dough. I think it's to aid the retention of moisture. When I mixed the boiling water with the flour, I noticed the flour became swollen with the water. Very interesting theory.

In the morning, I mixed the gelatinised dough, the sponge dough plus all the ingredients in the main dough in my Kenwood machine. For once, I was thankful my Kenwood is quite strong. This recipe requires a lot power. Because the mixture is so sticky, I think doing it by hand would have been so hard.

I tried to follow the recipe instructions as much as possible and I'm fairly sure I did everything right. Except after I put the dough in the oven, I forgot to set my timer. I don't use the oven timer because it's not very accurate. I was killing time watching a Korean drama when I suddenly realised my timer hadn't gone off. I checked my phone and nearly fainted. I forgot to press Start. I had no idea how long my bread had been baking! I decided to use the thermometer to check the temperature and it registered 100 deg C! OMG.

The magic bread felt hard as a rock!

And so so brown all over.

Because it is a magic bread, the inside was so, so soft!

After the bread had cooled down, the crust was less hard but still crusty.

In fact, I think it's a happy accident. I ended up with a crusty outside and nice soft bread on the inside. Hubs will love it.

Indeed a magic bread. You can't go wrong!

I couldn't resist and ate one of the ends. The other one I saved for hubs. The bread tastes good. I think it's going to be hard for me to go back to making straight dough bread after tasting this magic bread.