Soft white bread (no water roux needed)

The last time I wrote about baking white bread, I had used water roux (well, pretty much for everything!). But with the entire family affected by flu this time, I really did not have time and energy to make the roux etc to make the bread. But after eating the softest loaf, we were not yet ready to go back to the French bread type loaves the bread machine usually makes. I need not say how great it is to be able to eat freshly baked bread especially when sick and how wonderful it is when we can chuck everything into the bread machine and press a button! Before I found out about the water roux method, I was trying out baking white bread using soya flour as emulsifier to soften the crusts and insides. After varying the amount of soya flour needed to replace my bread flour, today, I finally found the perfect white bread with softer crust and fluffy insides. All these without changing the taste and colour of the bread! Here is my recipe...


You will need:
1 and 1/3 to 1 and 1/2 cups warm water
3 cups+ 2 tbsp of strong bread flour
2 tbsp soya flour
1.5 tsp salt
2 tbsp granulated sugar
1 tbsp milk powder
1 tbsp softened butter
1 tsp rapid raise yeast (bread machine yeast)

Place the ingredients in the list in the bread machine pan following the instructions for your machine. Place sugar, salt, butter and milk in the four corners and place yeast in the centre. Choose basic white bread setting and start.




You can hand knead as well, by mixing all the dry ingredients first and adding water to make a soft dough. Leave it raise for 1 hr. Punch it down, shape it into a loaf and leave it to raise a secodn time for 45 mins. Bake in preheated oven at 180 degrees for 40-50 mins until done.

So the results from my experiment: Golden crust that was way softer than what I get normally with my bread machine.

The insides were softest crumbs with the same taste and colour as commercial white bread without the after taste :) So, in conclusion, the water roux method does give softest results for milk bread. But for white loaf the very same results can be achieved by replacing around 3-5% of the bread flour with soya flour.