Bread – Recreating a bread

bread

I want to recreate a bread that we used to eat when I was a kid. The bakery is out of business (as of about 2 years ago), so I can't ask them for a recipe. It was called "Honey Wheat" bread, or perhaps (in later years) "Honey Health" bread. I've found recipes for those, and they sound similar, but the pictures say they're not. Here are the main differences between, say, this recipe:

https://www.tastesoflizzyt.com/honey-wheat-bread/

and what I'm looking for are

  1. Darker color. Ohlin's bread was sweet and had a color close to caramel. Not dark brown like pumpernickel, but not light brown either. Somewhere between the color of light-brown and dark-brown sugar, probably on the dark-brown end of things.

  2. More open texture: the holes in Ohlin's bread were more of a shape and distribution like those in an English muffin.

  3. Chewier. This bread had a chewiness that was about halfway between commercial whole-wheat bread and a good bagel.

  4. Shinier. When you cut the bread, the surface of the "bubbles" in it appeared a little bit shiny. (OK, I could be mis-remembering here…I last ate this bread over 50 years ago!)

I'm not expecting that anyone can say "Oh, HERE's how you make that," but if someone could provide guidance on how one alters a bread recipe to get a more open texture, to get more chewiness, etc., I can make 8 or 10 or 20 loaves to home in on the qualities I remember.

Thanks in advance for any help you can give. (Alternatively, if there's a good general reference on how to do this kind of thing, I'd be happy to read up on it without someone re-typing it all!)

Best Answer

Adding molasses or brown sugar will add a brown color to the dough, how much to add is a bit of a trick to get right, but it should be proportional to the amount of sugar in the dough. Most 1 lb recipes I have from American sources use about 1/3 cup of molasses.

The shine might well be additional gluten added to increase the chew (two with one stone perhaps!), but it could also be extra oil.

Bigger bubbles might indicate a damper dough with a higher yeast content or even possibly the addition of a second raising agent (e.g. baking powder). It could also indicate a higher baking temperature. You might want to check out focaccia recipes - these usually have a light airy crumb.

With commercial baked products it is difficult to know exactly what is going on as they have it all worked out for rapid and consistent mass production, rather than single batches.

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