Joe Duff's keto bread (modified)

Joe Duff is an affable meathead on YouTube who likes to wear muscle shirts, advertises himself as a keto chef, and talks about keto recipes. I said I would try making his keto-bread recipe next, but a modification in the comments below his bread video caught my eye: when one commenter complained that Duff's recipe produced a bread that was too heavy, a second commenter responded that the results are much lighter if you switch out half the almond flour with whey protein. I happen to have a bunch of whey-protein powder just sitting around, so I made the modification and executed Duff's recipe.

Long story short: the results were much better than I'd expected. The smell of the bread was far more pleasant, and I could easily envision modifications that might make the bread even more palatable. Is the bread good for burger and hot-dog buns? Well... it's still a bit heavy, even with the switch-out of half the almond flour with whey protein, so if you're planning to make buns with this dough, make thin ones.

Thin buns aren't hard to make with this modified dough: all that whey protein means the dough is less of a dough and more of a batter, which was fine for the mini-tins I used to create the hot-dog buns, but not so great for the hamburger bun, which was placed in the middle of a tray and was too runny to stand up on its own.

Anyway, for the hot-dog buns, the obvious solution is to either make buns that are half the size of the ones I made, or cut off the bottom halves of the buns and use only the top halves. Outside the context of hot dogs and hamburgers, though, I found this bread not only edible but even a bit likable. One possible improvement: egg wash the top and cover it with sesame seeds. Another improvement: add seeds of some sort right into the dough, maybe even poppy seeds. (I have chia seeds, but I don't know whether they can be used in this way.) A third improvement: add more fat to the dough than just a glug of olive oil. I might steal an idea from Charles's bun recipe and add in, say, half a cup of full-fat yogurt. And maybe a good bit of butter. The recipe is definitely worth revisiting, and if it can be tweaked this far, I bet it can be tweaked further. The result might not be hot-dog-friendly, but it'll still make for decent bread. I was, frankly, impressed. The muscular meathead did it.

For a bread with no yeast and using only baking powder, it had amazing oven spring. Look at the mutant creatures below and tremble:

As you see above, the hamburger bun is misshapen, but still somewhat bunlike, despite the sinkage caused by liquidy, almost batter-like dough.

Below, what appears to be a tumor. It was the first thing I ate off the bread:

What the crumb looked like when I broke the bread open:

I did let the bread cool for ten minutes before I handled it. I was specifically looking to see whether the "it's rubbery once it cools" complaint would apply to this bread. It did not, and I was surprised. In the final shot below, I've taken a bite out of a buttered piece:

Is this my new favorite bread? No way. Will I be serving this bread to the troops on Friday? No. I've decided to make Charles's buns for them, and I'll save some keto bread for myself. But is it the best keto bread I've made thus far? Yes. The almond-y taste of the almond flour doesn't dominate the bread, and while there's psyllium husk in the recipe, the proportion is tiny compared to what I've seen in other recipes, so you don't taste it. This bread actually behaves more like bread than any other keto recipe I've tried to make, and while I think it's still too heavy to make for a plausible hamburger or hot-dog bun, it'll do for this coming Friday, so I've bagged up the remaining bread and will pray it doesn't become all chewy and rubbery over the intervening days. What a surprise. Joe Duff for the win!

Now I need to think about ring molds or small, shallow, cylindrical cake pans to help make properly shaped burger buns. Time for another trip to B&C Market.