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.

65 Degree Celcius

While trawling the net for more new (to me) bread baking technique, I came across old posts about this book by Yvonne C from Taiwan 65°C湯種麵包 (Tāngzhǒng miànbāo). Literally it means 65 degree Celsius "soup type" bread. I was intrigued.

Tangzhong or rather a 65 deg Celcius tangzhong is the secret ingredient to achieve soft, moist and fluffy bread. As I did not have the book, I had to rely on recipes provided by bloggers.

 

 

This is how tangzhong is cooked. 1 part flour to 5 parts water is mixed and stirred over low heat until the mixture reaches 65 deg Celcius. It is then cooled, covered with cling wrap and later refrigerated. The following day, you can use it as a starter to bake bread.

So the trick is to create the gelatinised dough at 65 deg C as something magical happens at that temperature. I guess something to do with capturing moisture, leavening. I don't really know the science. Anyway, the smell of 65 deg C tangzhong isn't very good especially after you take it out of the fridge and leave it on the table for a while. 

This blogger had a tangzhong recipe for wholemeal bread and I decided to try it out.

In goes the tangzhong with the rest of the main dough.

I noticed when I used my hands to feel the dough there were noticeable tiny lumps, probably caused by the tangzhong.

The bread turned out looking okay. It had all the usual desirable - soft, moist, fluffy. Quite similar to Alex Goh's bread. (remember him?) However, after eating the bread, I thought the bread tasted gummy. Thinking that perhaps I had not let the bread cool down enough, I tried the bread again the next morning. Still gummy. The gummy thing really spoiled the bread for me. I think in the end, hubs and my son ate most of the bread. They weren't bothered by the gumminess and I won't be surprised if they didn't even know it was there. To me, whether bread tastes good depends on the flavour as well as what some may call mouthfeel. The gummy taste is very subtle and I actually hate that I could detect it. I wish I have a more easy going tongue!

Anyway, I definitely won't make this bread again and thus must continue my search for better wholemeal bread.

Actually I had another thought and decided I would seek out the tangzhong book and try out the recipes in the book.

Updated Tutorial Page

I've recently updated my Tutorials page. In case you've never known such a page existed, you can access it via the menu. Looking through it, I realised I haven't written as many tutorials as I could have considering I've been blogging since September 2007. Perhaps I should rectify that this year?

I spent some time reorganizing the tutorial page and one thing I can say with all my heart - I dislike working with table html. Ugh, phui!

My little blog crossed one million views some time ago. Since I wrote my first blog in September 2007, it sure took a long time to reach a million page views. (it probably included spam views!) I used to read this blog and it had 8 million views. And the blogger stopped blogging! Can you believe it? I will never be able to achieve 8 million views in my lifetime.

Speaking of page views, I thought it would be interesting to let you know which are my more popular posts. Obviously my bag/pouch tutes are the bestsellers but apart from these, two posts stood out. I'm very sure you're going to be surprised which two these are.

How to stitch a tatted motif to felt. I wrote this in response to Christel's comment. It beats me why people keep coming to read this post.

The other surprise hit is How to attach a PDF to your Blogger blog post.

I also wrote a series of applique related tutes. Out of these, the blanket stitch by hand and blanket stitch by machine tutes got more hits.

When I write a tute, I never know how popular it will be. Of course I hoped it would be used and referenced but you never know until you publish it. I don't want to dwell too much on my page views because it's so pathetic, right? Anyway, I hope you will use my Tutorials Page and I will try my best to keep it updated. I have written another tute and it should be published some time this week. See ya.