I've been rediscovering the joy of baking bread. A few weeks ago I started making
focaccia, which was eaten very quickly. Then the other day I was flipping through the recent issue of
Cook's Illustrated and read an article on perfecting cinnamon bread. I think that Cook's Illustrated has some very interesting ideas but find their processes fussy. Their premise was that one can make a cinnamon bread at home that doesn't have the big gaping holes that occur where the cinnamon filling meets the bread dough. I wondered if one could achieve a similar effect using a pullman loaf pan. So I tried it. I made a challah dough using the recipe from
The Bread Baker's Apprentice by Peter Reinhart, which I tweaked just a bit by using regular yeast instead of the instant yeast called for and allowed for longer rising times.
Here is the dough before it's first rise. Challah is a very forgiving dough. Plus it is super simple to make in a stand mixer. It has a lovely pale yellow color due to the eggs and egg yolks in the dough, which according to Peter Reinhart was probably a way to use up excess eggs before the Sabbath made it impossible to harvest new eggs. It also has a very small amount of oil in it; I used a lovely pale green grapeseed oil. I let it rise twice in the bowl.
Then I patted it into something that resembles a rectangle and let it rest under a towel for about 10 minutes. Then I rolled it out into an even larger rectangle, really it was more like a parallelogram, which really didn't matter much to me since I was going to roll it up jelly roll style. Then I brushed it with a small amount of melted butter, spread cinnamon sugar over the surface, rolled it up, tucked under the ends and put it in a lightly oiled pullman loaf pan.
A pullman loaf pan has a lid and makes a loaf with a flat, rather than rounded, top. It also doesn't allow much of a crust to develop so that it is easy to make crustless finger sandwiches with bread baked in one. But, my quest was for a cinnamon swirl bread that didn't have a bunch of giant holes in it.
I put the cover on most of the way--I left it open about 1/2-inch and let it rise until it was about 3/4 of the way up the sides of the pan. I closed the lid the rest of the way and put it in a 350F oven to bake for about 50 minutes.
Here is the loaf as it came out of the pan. The filling leaked just a bit but not so much that the pan had gooey filling all over it. So I considered that a success. Of course, the real telling was when I cut into the loaf. There were some holes where the filling and dough did not stick together. But wasn't not so bad that the slices didn't hold together. I put two slices in the toaster this morning, which maintained their shape. Again, I think this is a success.
Oh, and the toast was very lovely. This is an experiment worth repeating.
