Bread Doctor

In my last post I mentioned getting the book 湯種麵包 Tāngzhǒng miànbāo. I looked for it in the library and managed to get a copy.

This is the book. I noticed the English title of the book is Bread Doctor. I'm quite curious why... The book is totally in Chinese. Not only that, it's in traditional Chinese. Singapore uses simplified Chinese. What's the difference you ask. Well, traditional Chinese looks more cluttered and have more strokes.

湯種麵包 traditional
汤种面包 simplified

Traditional Chinese is still used in Taiwan and Hong Kong and possibly other places. Anyway, traditional or simplified, I have great difficulty reading Chinese. I did make an attempt and much to my surprise, I could figure out some parts of the recipes! After all, how many ways are there to write a recipe? Just to be sure, I asked a friend to do a translation to see if it matched my own translation.

from the book

I looked for a wholemeal bread recipe and this is the recipe I chose. It had some weird beans and powder thingy which I omitted. I also made a fresh batch of tangzhong.

The recipe only called for 40g of wholemeal flour which is why the dough turned out quite white. I noticed that the final dough had similar small lumps after the tangzhong was mixed with the main dough.

 

I added rolled oats on top of the dough just to give it some texture.

While the bread was baking, I did think to myself: this bread doesn't smell nice. Usually when the bread dough is being baked, there's a nice bread smell. You know what I mean? I didn't pay attention if the same thing happened when I was baking the tangzhong wholemeal bread here. The bread did turn out a bit flat. I noticed in the book, the bread didn't rise very much either. So I don't think I was too far off.

I wanted to see if Yvonne C's tangzhong bread tasted gummy. It didn't! It didn't! So maybe the gumminess in my previous bread wasn't due to the tangzhong? I don't really care enough to investigate what caused it. The taste of Yvonne C's tangzhong wholemeal bread was so so. But the bread was moist, soft and fluffy.

After eating a couple of slices of the bread, I realised something. I really, really, really dislike the taste of tangzhong bread! I can't quite place it. I'm not sure if it's the lack of taste or the presence of a particular taste. It's hard to put my finger on it. But it's there.

Since Alex Goh and Yvonne C's bread are quite similar, I shall compare them. In terms of moistness, softness, fluffiness, both hit the mark. But I prefer Alex Goh's bread (even though I'm over him already) because his bread is tastier.

Next on my baking journey - I'm entering the world of sourdough.