Saturday, February 16, 2008

Chai bread?

The other day at the grocery store there was a sale on Chai seasoning which I've never seen or used before so I splurged and spent $2 to buy a bottle. It appears to be made up of ginger, cinnamon, sugar, clove, cardamom and pepper - not sure since the ingredients are not listed, but that's what I tasted. I decided I would bake some sweetish bread with it since bread is cheap and easy with the bread machine. I suppose I could have looked on the internet for a recipe, but I decided to just make one up and see what happened. I was planning on using whole wheat flour, but that had bugs in it - eeeww - so I made it with my bug-free unbleached white flour. The amount of water was an eyeball guess - I added the 3 Tablespoons after the dough seemed a bit stiff, however, it's pouring down rain here today which tends to throw bread dough off a bit. I invent bread recipes all the time and I never write them down which is a problem when something turns out really spectacular and I want to make it again. No idea how this will turn out, but here's what I used:

3/4 cup + 3 Tablespoons Water
2 Tablespoons Butter (unsalted), melted
3 Tablespoons Maple Syrup
3 cups White flour
2 Tablespoons Milk Powder
1 teaspoon Sea Salt
1 Tablespoon Chai seasoning
1 packet dry yeast

I'll update later when it's done as to whether it was a success or not, but I've discovered it's pretty hard to screw up bread - even if the recipe is a bit off, the fact that it's fresh baked tends to make up for any mistakes. And there's few things I love more than fresh baked bread!
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Update: It turned out pretty damn good. It's not the best bread recipe I ever came up with, but good enough that I'll be making this one again, maybe adding an egg next time.

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