The quest begins: honey oat sandwich bread v. 01

I was on the hunt for a new sandwich bread recipe to try last week, partly as a distraction from, you know, *gestures vaguely* the everything, and partly because my current go-to isn’t made with whole wheat in mind. It has a tendency to either misbehave in the proof and get really rough and open crumbed, or dry out and stale quickly, and I don’t love that. Plus, I love honey-oat sandwich bread, and this doesn’t quite fit the bill.

Enter King Arthur Baking Company’s Vermont Whole Wheat Honey Oatmeal Bread. It ticked a bunch of my boxes – it is designed specifically for whole wheat flour, it includes both honey and oats, and it has a lovely nearly-one-bowl mixing method that melts my little dishes hating heart. So I baked it. And it was delicious. A beautiful, pillowy-soft crumb that reminded me of the best kinds of cheap squishy supermarket sandwich bread, the faintest whiff of cinnamon to play off the oats, enough tooth to keep things interesting, and, best of all, it didn’t get noticeably dry or stale-tasting until nearly the end of the week.

It was, however, very sweet. We’re talking cinnamon roll-without-the-icing type sweet. Which was amazing spread with butter for breakfast, or for PB&Js…not so much what I’m going for in ham and cheese.

So I decided to hack it.

Step 1: Reduce the sugar

This seems like the easiest thing to fix, right? Just pull the sugar back and Bob’s your uncle.

Not quite.

Sugar plays a number of important roles in baked goods – first, it inhibits gluten development by stealing water from the flour¹, which keeps bread and other baked goods soft. Similarly, because sugar is hygroscopic (it absorbs water very readily), it also helps prevent water from evaporating during baking, which results in a moister, more tender crumb³. This water-stealing behavior also means sugar can act as a preservative after baking. It will draw water from the atmosphere, helping to prevent staling^2,3.

So I can’t just cut the sugar dramatically and expect the same result. I’m going to need to take other steps to protect the texture. But I’ll solve that problem later. For now, I will focus on figuring out how much sugar I need to remove to get the flavor that I want.

For that, I turn to baker’s percentages.

A baker’s percent frames all ingredient proportions in relation to the flour by weight. The flour is always 100 percent when using baker’s percentages, and everything is calculated relative to that. So, looking at the King Arthur sandwich bread recipe we have:

For clarity, I have left out ingredients unrelated to the changes I’m planning to make. The first thing to notice is that both flours are taken together to figure out the rest of the percentages. The second thing to notice is that between the sugar and the honey, this bread formula is 19 percent sugar. That is too much sugar.

I couldn’t find much solid research on how much sugar it takes to create the dough properties I was looking for, but at least anecdotally, 10 percent is the point when bread starts to taste sweet. To be on the safe side, I decided to start by aiming for a total sugar content of 8 percent.

I didn’t want to touch the amount of honey, since that is one of the key flavor beats in this loaf. So, I cut the dark brown sugar back to just 33 grams, or 5 percent of the total flour weight.

Step 2: Preserve the crumb

Now that I’ve cut the sugar, how do I keep that gorgeous pillowy crumb? I originally thought about increasing the amount of water in the dough to start with, but that would make the dough pretty much impossible to shape into a traditional sandwich bread loaf. I also thought about decreasing the oats or whole wheat flour but dismissed that idea pretty quickly since I want to keep those flavors at the forefront.

And then I remembered: tangzhong.

Popularized across Asia by Chinese cookbook author Yvonne Chen, a tangzhong is a pre-cooked paste made of a portion of the dough’s flour and water. Pre-cooking the flour does two things: it gelatinizes the starches so that they can absorb more water, and it creates structure in those starches so they can hold onto that water. This results in a dough that is less sticky and easier to knead, and a final product that will stay soft longer because it retains more water during baking.

A tangzhong is typically made from between 5-10 percent of the flour in the original recipe, at a ratio of one part flour to five parts liquid by weight. It is also important to note that this technique works best in doughs with at least 75 percent hydration, that is, doughs that contain 75 percent of the total flour weight as water or another liquid.

Let’s look at the original recipe again.

Right off the bat, I can see that my hydration is too low. I know it would probably be fine to just bump it to 75 percent, but I want to play it safe and take it all the way to 80.

Here’s why. I know in the original recipe the oats soak for a while in the water, and I also know that I’m going to have to take some of that water out to make the tangzhong. I want to make sure that the oats have enough water to soak properly, so I’ll add an extra 5 percent to make up the difference. That means my recipe now calls for 522 grams of water.

Now, the tangzhong. Again, I’m going to play it safe here and start on the low end of the flour range – I’ll set aside 5 percent, or 33 grams. I’m also going to use only all-purpose flour in the tangzhong, just because I haven’t tried it with whole wheat before and I only want to mess with so many things at once, you know?

Since I know that tangzhong pastes are typically a 1:5 ratio, I need to set aside 163 grams of water.

Which means the final recipe now looks like this:

Step 3: Bake!

My changes worked! This recipe is by no means perfect, and I’ll talk about the things I still want to tweak in a moment, but I produced two delicious, perfectly servicable loaves of sandwich bread. By and large, the tangzhong did exactly what I was hoping it would – my loaves had a super squishy, pillowy texture that made gorgeous, relatively crumb-free slices. And that crumb stayed that way for about 4 days – pretty good for homemade.

That said, I think I can do better.

For one, I find myself missing some of the sweetness of the original loaf. I’m still not looking for a super-sweet bread, but the sugar highlighted some of the nuttiness of the oats and wheat in a way that makes this bake feel a bit flat in comparison. I’m thinking of two ways to fix this – toast the oats, and bring the total sugars up to about 10 percent. It shouldn’t be noticeable, but it should give me the depth I’m looking for.

I also think I’m going to pull the cinnamon back a bit. I love what it does for the oats, but without the sweetness of the sugar, a full teaspoon feels out of place.

Finally, I’m going to try increasing the amount of flour in the tangzhong. If it works the way I think it should, using 8-10 percent of the total flour weight will make the final sandwich bread even fluffier and improve its shelf life.

For now, it’s lunchtime. And I have sandwiches to make!

¹ On Food and Cooking: the Science and Lore of the Kitchen, by Harold McGee, Scribner, 2004, pp. 525–525.

² Bread Science: the Chemistry and Craft of Making Bread, by Emily Buehler, Two Blue Books, 2009, pp. 101–101.

³ Baking and Pastry: Mastering the Art and Craft, John Wiley & Sons, 2016, pp. 63–67.