Anger Burger

For a few weeks now I’ve been baking this utterly benign, utterly American and utterly delicious white bread – this, after a straight year of fervent part-rye, wild yeast No-Kneading.  I don’t know if it’s the resident Viking I live with finally wearing me down¹, but one day I just wanted a goddamn baloney sandwich on a loaf of bread that didn’t turn the roof of my mouth into ground beef.

I should point out that I’m among the great lazy bakers of this country and most days I’m too lazy to walk to the store to buy a loaf of sliced sandwich bread.  “Lazy” might be the wrong word.  Agoraphobic is closer.  That in mind, when I say this white bread recipe is just as easy as leaving a bowl of No-Knead slop overnight to form gluten strands, I’m not fucking around.

This bread recipe is found on the internet easily enough, having come from no grander point of origin than the Betty Crocker Cookbook.  Depending on which edition you’re working with, it has been called over the decades:

• “Jewish Challah“  I assure you this recipe is not challah, though even the most recent edition of the Betty Crocker Cookbook advises the baker to make a “challah braid” in which they simply give directions to make a braided loaf.  Better Crocker seems a little confused that challah is an entirely different recipe.

• “Country Crust“  I feel compelled to spell it “Kuntry Krust”.

• “Rich Egg Bread“  This name is as misleading as calling it challah; it has an egg, yes, but one egg gets lost in nearly 4 cups of flour and a cup of water.

All of this works to distract the baker from the most important point: this is a delightful, All-American white bread.  The crust is soft but brown, the interior is tender, yeasty and the texture of sturdy cotton candy.  It is about as close as you’re going to get to Wonderbread without suckling from Satan’s high-fructose corn syrup teat.

As a matter of practicality, I always braid this loaf.  It makes a better size slice for my taste, but it also suits my vintage oven better (in which a modern turkey will literally not fit).  Also: people are mesmerized by the ability to braid dough.  Really.  It’s the kitchen equivalent of doing a backflip.

Also!  Because I’ve been tossing out picture-perfect loaves for the last few weeks, today my loaf decided to look like a super-mutant.  Classic.

Lastly, a note on the use of “diastatic malt” in the recipe: diastatic malt is an ingredient utilized by professional bakers to increase yeast productivity, browning and flavor.  There’s nothing insidious about it — it’s merely barley flour — and a scant teaspoon per loaf makes the bread even softer.  A $4 1lb. bag from King Arthur Flour will last you ages.

Kuntry Krust White Bread

3½ C. unbleached bread flour
2 tsp. kosher salt
2¼ tsp. dry instant yeast  (1 packet)
1 tsp. diastatic malt

¼ C. unbleached sugar
2 Tbl. good olive oil (plus extra for greasin’)
1 egg
1 C. hot water, as hot as your tap will run

• Grease a glass or metal bowl with some olive oil.

• In the bowl of your stand mixer, lightly stir together the flour, salt, yeast and diastatic malt.  Fit mixer with the dough hook.

• In a 2 or 4-cup Pyrex measuring up, stir together the egg, sugar and oil while your tap runs to hot.  The egg, sugar and oil should be almost exactly ½ cup.  Add the 1 cup of hot water, which will bring your measurements up to 1½.

• While mixer is running on low, slowly begin to add the hot water/egg mixture.  The tidier you are about this now, the faster the dough will incorporate without you having to scrape shit down.

• When everything seems pretty much together, set the mixer to medium and let it run for about 10 minutes, or until the dough seems smooth and pleasant to the touch.  There is a chance that about 5 minutes in the dough will seem way too wet to you (sticking to the sides of the bowl wet), but you’ll be adding more flour when you knead by hand later, so relax.  Kitchenaid now says that allowing your mixer to run for longer than 5 minutes at a time (or 3 on tough items, like this bread) will wear your machine out faster, to which I say: no shit, Sherlock.  But I didn’t buy the mixer to keep it in a museum, I bought it to make bread.

• Turn the dough out onto some more bread flour sprinkled on a work surface.  Knead for about 3 minutes, adding more flour as necessary to keep the dough from sticking to you or the surface.  Form a ball, put it into the greased bowl, cover with plastic wrap and set somewhere warm to rise.  If you have a gas oven with a pilot light, inside the oven (turned off!) is a good place.  If you have an electric oven you’re on your own.

• Let dough rise about 40 minutes, or until doubled.

• Turn out dough onto work surface again, which hopefully you haven’t yet bothered cleaning, and cut into three even hunks.  Firmly but working fast, roll each hunk into a long rope, pulling a little to achieve length, and then braid.  I find it’s easiest to braid directly on the baking sheet (or on the Silpat or on a piece of baking parchment, and then sliding that onto the baking sheet).  Cover the braid with the plastic wrap from the bowl you hopefully haven’t yet thrown away and set on top of the oven while it heats up to 325°.  It will just about double during this time.

• Remove plastic, put bread into oven and bake for 35-45 minutes or until the crust is a rich brown shade and the bread makes a slight hollow sound when you thunk it.  Remove to a rack to cool.

• Get impatient, cut while still hot and eat with butter.

¹Not that he didn’t like the No-Knead, but as a rule he prefers soft breads over crusty.