BBA Challenge Bread #27—Portuguese Sweet Bread

This took forever to make (OK, not really) but it was worth it—bread #27 Portuguese Sweet Bread.

I'm baking my way through Peter Reinhart's award winning book, The Bread Baker's Apprentice, along with 200+ other amateur bakers (maybe not that many anymore-it's hard to telll!). Want to join in the madness, or just learn more about this semi-crazy undertaking? Check out the following links:

• Pinch My Salt BBA Challenge page—master resource for the challenge
• Buy the Book Bread Baker's Apprentice by Peter Reinhart
• List of Breads See what's coming up.
• Blogroll See who's baking. Great list of some amazing foodie (and not-necessarily-foodie) blogs.
• Flickr Group Photos, photos and more photos!
• Facebook
• Twitter Search for #BBA to find challenge tweets.

I made this bread over a month ago, but I still remember how good it tastes. Sweet (duh) but not cloyingly so, soft, fragrant, with hints of lemon and orange. Absolutely delicious.

Call me unsophisticated, but I've always loved Hawaiian bread—you know the round squishy loaf in the orange and brown plastic. I could eat my weight in that stuff when I was a kid. I would say that Peter Reinhart's formula is the grown-up version of that bread. Much less sweet, more complex flavors and full of wholesome, homemade goodness, unlike the packaged stuff which probably has 43 ingredients, two-thirds of which are unpronounceable or really bad for you. So let's take a quick look at the process.

This starts with a sponge of flour, sugar, yeast and water. You let that sit for 60-90 minutes then finish mixing up the dough.

There are quite a few ingredients in this one, but they all help make the bread as yummy as it is.




Enriched with butter, shortening, eggs, and powdered milk, you can see why it comes out so soft.

The wonderful aroma and flavor come from the three extracts—lemon, orange and vanilla. Mmm...

Check out this dough:

It starts out all shaggy and rough, but after some kneading in the mixer and a quick finish by hand, it comes out smooth, soft and supple.

Now you let it ferment until it doubles, which according to the book, should take two hours. Try over three. And even then, I don't think it had completely doubled. So I divided the dough in two and shaped them into boules. You're supposed to put them in 9-inch pie pans—which I did—and they're supposed to "fill the pan fully, doubling in size and overlapping the edges slightly."

Huh?

Look at this:

Clearly even if this doubled, it wouldn't fill the plate and overlap the edges. And it didn't. 

It's supposed to take 2-3 hours to reach this point, but it was at least 4. I called it good and brushed them with egg wash and popped in the oven for about 40 minutes. Oh my goodness. These smelled so good baking and the COLOR.

Wow, the color is just incredible. The combination of sugar in the bread and egg wash made for the most gorgeous crust. And the crumb is beautiful, too.

Now, this was super delicious all on it's own. But let me tell you. This makes the best French toast!

I utilize a slight modification of the method I saw Alton Brown use on Good Eats. You dip the bread in the egg mixture then let it sit on a rack to let it soak in. I sprinkled mine with some Penzey's Baking Spice for an extra jolt of spice-a-licious-ness.




Then I fired up our two-burner griddle—a Christmas present to Dwight a few years ago—and greased it with, what else—butter.

OK, now I want French Toast!