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Bread making

Posted in Bread, Food Photography, Food styling & presentation on November 26, 2011| Leave a Comment »

This was an area that I thought I would never get involved again. I used to work as a chef at a local healthfood store, and I remembered about the breads I handmade using organic flour were almost as hard as rock. At that time I didn’t understand about how gluten worked and how the gluten needed to be relaxed and stretched to create a soft texture. Arm muscle soreness from hours of hand kneading, without knowing the proper methods, really scared me away for more than a decade, until recently when I got my KitchenAid mixer.

As mentioned in my earlier post, I have problems digesting gluten and am allergic to yeast. So basically, I can’t eat any of the normal breads made using wheat flour and yeast. However, the temptation was very strong to try again after reading all the blogs online and facebook photos of my friends producing soft and fluffy buns and breads. So I knew I just had to give it a go again!

While I am writing this, I’ve made numerous batches of breads and buns already. The toughest one was I had to make about 50 – 60 pieces of different types of Middle Eastern bread for a food styling project. I broke my KitchenAid mixer because of that too! And that was the time I found out that my KitchenAid stand mixer is not powerful or durable enough for bread making.

After these numerous attempts, I am proud to say that I’ve mastered the basic skills of bread making, but I would like to bring it to the higher artisan level, which I would like to spend more time exploring.

I’ve kneaded using the dough hook on KitchenAid, using purely my hands, a bread maker (at my friend’s house) and also using both KitchenAid mixer and hand to reduce the stress on the mixer. I have to agree that machine made bread dough is still the best and the easiest, and I’m really eying on getting a proper commercial bread dough and cake peripheral mixer so that I can make bigger batches without the worries of damaging the machine!

Some of the breads and buns I made are for ordering, if you are staying in KL, PJ and surrounding areas. The most popular ones and my favourite buns to make, are the chocolate swirl buns that come in various shapes and sizes (photos below), made using premium quality Swiss, French or Belgium chocolates, and free from added preservatives or colourings. I do not use any artificial bread improver as well.

The pricing is RM40 for 10 buns, minimum order is 10 buns. Local pick up only. Ingredients used include high protein wheat flour, egg, milk, salt, sugar, yeast, premium dark chocolate bar (60% cocoa solids and above), French dark chocolate powder, corn flour, extra virgin olive oil, and white sesame seeds. The buns have a soft but firm texture. They are however, best eaten when still warm! Do drop me an email (cyphang@gmail.com) if you are interested to make any orders! Kindly order 2 – 3 days in advance as I can be very busy at times with my other businesses.