Lessons learned from last night:
1. As a base recipe, Joe Duff's keto bread is plausibly good.
2. Don't put so much bread batter in the mini-tins.
3. Add more fat to the dough. My buddy Charles recommended sour cream; I'm going to add that plus some softened butter for extra richness, and to help make the bread a little less dense. This will make the bread even more like a batter, but that can't be helped. Meanwhile, I really need to get some bread molds. If I leave work early enough today, I can hit B&C Market and grab some. I wonder whether they have actual burger-bun molds.
4. Add black sesame seeds into the dough. I don't have poppy seeds, but I want something flavoring the buns' interior.
5. Paint the tops of the buns with egg wash and add white sesame seeds to the top.
6. When baking, use the top burner for only 10 minutes. Bake the rest of the way using the bottom burner only. This is mainly because I'll be using an egg wash this time.
I think we're close on this one, guys. We may actually have plausible keto burger and hot-dog buns soon. The crucial thing is getting the ring mold or burger-bun mold so as to help the dough/batter retain its shape during baking. On the burger bun I made from Joe Duff's recipe, there was a weird little "peninsula" jutting out; I ripped that off and ate it as punishment for unnecessary weirdness.
You might or might not be asking yourself: will an egg wash work on a batter? Good question. I wasn't entirely clear in the previous post: the dough started off so loose as to be almost liquid, hence my "batter" reference. But after sitting for half an hour, it had firmed up (thanks to xanthan gum, flaxseed, and psyllium)—not to the point of regular bread dough, but to a point where the burger bun could sit in the center of a tray and spread only a little as it sagged in slow motion. A dough like that can indeed be painted over with egg wash.
So I'll hit B&C Market for the ring/burger molds, and then I'll hit SSG Food Mart for a tub of sour cream, and we'll try this thing again tonight.
Working out the macros for this revised recipe is gonna be a bitch...
As a follow-up to my previous comment, from what you are saying this dough does not have a proofing stage; the 30-minute rest you mentioned sounds more like autolysis, although I don't know if there are actually any enzymes at work or if the dry ingredients are just absorbing the water. At any rate, you might want to experiment with a proof (maybe 60 minutes) after shaping and before baking. This may help with run-away oven spring and give you more uniform loaves.
ReplyDeleteOr it may not. You're dabbling in black magic here, so who knows what demons you'll conjure up.
So how relevant is proofing when there's no yeast? This dough's rising agent is baking powder. Does baking powder require proofing?
ReplyDeleteYeah, see my previous comments (that is, the comments on your later posts). I was under the impression that this was a yeast bread. It all makes sense now.
ReplyDeleteI wasn't sure whether you'd caught the mention of baking powder, and I was honestly curious as to whether the concept of proofing applied as much to baking-powder-related chemical reactions as to yeast-related activity.
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