Don’t Serve Bread If You Don’t Like the Taste of Marmalade Shame
Hello friends and welcome back toWill It Sous Vide? , the column where I usually do whatever you want with my immersion circulator. This week we are again trying sous vide baked goods that, with the exception of custard-based desserts , have had no results in the past.
My main concerns about sous vide bread and its baking in general:
- Given the fact that we cook in an airtight environment, the moisture has nowhere to go, which means our bread will become wet, or at least sticky.
- The water cannot get hot enough to trigger a browning reaction that forms a crust, and bread without a crust is like a snail without a shell – soft and unattractive.
But bread kept showing up in our selection of topics sessions, and when one gracious reader sent me this article on Icelandic hot spring bread , I was cautiously reassured. In fact, I was more than careful, I was full of optimism. I bought a fancy European oil and I was full of arrogance. Not only was the cooking temperature pretty close to what we could achieve with our circulating pump, but the ingredients were pretty simple:
- 4 cups dark rye flour
- 2 cups wheat flour
- 2 cups sugar
- 4 teaspoons baking powder
- 1 liter of milk
- A pinch of salt
I sifted the wet ingredients together, then slowly added the milk to make a batter.
My initial plan was to pour the dough into a bread pan and then seal it in a vacuum bag, but I just didn’t have the big bags and the blunt pan wouldn’t fit in the middle ones.
So, I took the classic sous-vide packaging route and poured the dough into a bag and a small oiled jar, because what would this experiment be without a small jar?
Then, instead of putting my jars in a hot spring and covering them with mud, I threw them in a very hot 190-degree water bath and let them hang out for 20 hours.
Note: One of the specialties of sous vide cooking is that you don’t smell the food you are cooking. Sometimes that’s good, but in the case of baking bread, I feel like I’m being robbed a little. Breathing in the aroma of baked bread is a very pleasant sensory experience, and I missed it here a lot.
Be that as it may, after 20 hours of cooking, the bread in the bag floated to the surface of the bathtub and felt quite hard when poked. Plus it looked insanely unattractive.
I decided to try the bread in the jar first and ran the knife along the edge to help it slip out. Then I cut it in half and began to look into the abyss in which lies the sous-vide bread.
Then I took a test bite and experienced what I can only describe as “sticky shame.” The “bread” stuck to my teeth in a very unpleasant way, just like our sad cake in a sous vide can . I hated it and hated myself for bringing it into the world.
The bagged bread was also disappointing, thick and sticky with no real taste. At first I thought I was just not cooking it long enough and started packing it again in another bag for another sauce, but then I removed the thinner edge that felt a little less moist and compact.
Although the edge, of course, was more like a bread and had a more open crumb, I was still very sad. The gooey shame returned and I spat like all the previous bites.
So, will there be bread sous-vide?
Answer? No, and I think we as a community should stop trying to do that. If a recipe worked, it would be this one, but this system is completely unsuitable for baking. Although our sous-vide setup is similar to a hot spring, the cooking container used in the hot spring indicated is not airtight or completely submerged in water. This allows the moisture to go somewhere, and – although it looks like the Icelandic volcano bread is very moist and tender – it prevents it from becoming sticky. But at least now we know, my friends, which means that no one needs to waste their time and torment on tragedy – sous-vide bread.