Baking Pain de mie Bread in Pullman Pans

Joshua,

That loaf of bread looks delicious! How do you cut it with your bread knife so that the slices are straight? I havent got that down yet and my slices are always very uneven.

If you have a hard time doing it by eye, you can use something like a classic bread loaf slicer or one of the more modern ones, which looks like this YouTube clip. So far, we've done it manually but I've been considering one of the former just for convenience as it seems like it would be quicker. I know a lot of people like them.

As for the knife, we use this one and it is phenomenal. I could never go back to any other knife. It lets you cut effortlessly without crushing the loaf. It's so good, we use it for vegetables a lot of the time, too. It has 433 reviews and 5 stars, every one of which is deserved.

From the thumbnail, I thought you had a Good Delivery bar on your countertop or something. My second thought was you posted a screenshot of a corundum ingot. I haven't opened Skyrim in over a year, and it still weighs on my mind...ಠ_ಠ

If you try a bread recipe using whole-grain flour, could you post the results for the health nuts and diabetics in your audience? Thanks 🙂

With the way Joshua talks about gold, thinking about him having a half-million of physical on hand (that he would actually show off, no less) made me laugh. Though a LBMA good delivery bar is certainly on the list of things that would be nice to wake up next to.

Exactly! The apparent 180º in behavior confused me for a bit. It took me a couple of seconds to register what the title meant, because the phrasing of "Baking Pain de mie" is initially confusing for someone who's never heard of that type of bread before. In those seconds, my mind wandered back to my gaming days. Gah.

I don't know about you, Scott, but I prefer to wake up to the soft touch a woman. Gold bullion doesn't caress you back :p

Purchased. After making that amazing herb infused bread recipe you posted a while back I will never ignore any bread article you post:)

This bread is definitely a country white bread that most Americans eat, nothing fancy. Personally, I like it when I'm feeling a bit nostalgic about my childhood. It's best if you put it in a toaster and let it get slightly warm, like it was just out of the oven but not yet showing visible signs of toasting, and then put butter or jam on it because it releases the scent and flavor of that freshly-baked experience.

You do have to eat it fairly quickly though, within a few days normally, or it will dry out because it has no preservatives. I found that with this particular ingredient list, after you have cut into it, you need to wrap it in plastic wrap and put it somewhere dark to keep it moist. It's the nature of the recipe, unfortunately, unlike the hardier artisan breads.

I'm hoping to cook a lot more bread tests this autumn, sometime between September and November. I'll try to find a few good ones that make the cut and post them if you're interested. (As always, if you come across anything interesting, too, please let me know! I've gotten some great suggestions in the past this way.)

Thanks Joshua, that would be great. What I really hope to find is a somewhat healthy (whole wheat?) yet tasty recipe that will cook up into the Pullman Pan shape.

I mostly stopped shopping at the local supermarkets in my area after making it my mission to obsessively read every ingredients list and buy nothing with HFCS, maltodextrin, or anything else that isn't a whole food. I found those in nearly all brands at the local supermarket, thus I switched to Trader Joe's which gave me a much higher probability of being able to buy food :-).

I'm lucky to live in Winnipeg with respect to bread... every grocery store carries Rye Bread from some of the local bakeries.

4-6 Ingredient breads and I love the taste of rye bread on top of that.

Although apparently what I eat is "Winnipeg Style" rye bread which is very different from the rye bread everyone else eats.

All American cities carry the specialty breads, like Jewish ryes, with few ingredients, they are $4+/loaf and unaffordable for most families, most Americans buy the $1/loaf bread.

Your food posts are some of the most enjoyable posts for me to read, and quite often inspirational! I agree with the idea of minimal ingredient breads, and we have only made our own for over a year now. My wife and I are learning to be better cooks, and someday hope to have a kitchen that is as communal as yours seems to be, with similarly delicious foods!

I have never used a pullman loaf pan, and it seems like a good way to have more efficiently sized sandwiches for packing a lunch. I will also need to try to start using honey instead of granulated sugar.

I've been using the "White Bread" recipe from "Baking With Julia" for over 10 years; started baking my own bread exclusively when living in Guam, where the bread was not particularly good at all. It's got flour, water, salt, and yeast, plus melted butter for fat. That's it. (I don't care for dairy in my breads). It bakes up nice, and has good body, but still light enough to not be reminiscent of a country bread.

I'll have to try this one, thanks for letting me know!

Joshua, I make this bread for my family often. I am surprised that you report to make it for so little cost. I think my Pain de Mie cost about 1 dollars for a 20 ounce loaf (which is what a grocery store bread weighs) because of the expense of the special bakers milk and the potato flour. My actual loaf weighs about 28 ounces and with the remaining dough, I make a 12 ounce loaf (in a regular bread pan) that we usually consume with dinner the day I bake. Often I will cut the smaller loaf while it is still warm. I have even taken to making it with bleached flour to bring down the cost because I can buy bleached APF in bulk but not unbleached. I wish I could find a source of good unbleached flour in bulk. I beg to differ with the person who said that the Pain De Mie goes stale quickly. Mine taste good for days on end. I do add some ascorbic acid, and King Arthur Flour's Cake Enhancer and those two do seem to keep the bread from getting stale or moldy. I also add a tiny bit of lecithin which I think helps too. I bake mine at 350 for exactly 40 minutes or it seems to keyhole. I wish I could get my crust as light as yours and not have a key-holing problem. The bread reaches a done temperature much earlier than the 40 minutes but I have had it keyhole if I try to take it out even one minute earlier. I even bought a Mafter pullman to see if it would help give me a lighter crust. I didn't think the blue steel performed any better than the USA pullmans I have from King Arthur flour. I would love your opinion on that too. Do you think the Mafter Exoglass pans perform better? Anyway, I would love to see a breakdown of the cost of your Pain De Mie. Thank you so much for sharing your experience. I love this bread recipe and I have used it as an emersion learning bread recipe.

I wonder if there is some sort of geographic variation on grocery costs? When I was down in Georgia recently, even the McDonald's menu was 10% to 20% higher than it is in Missouri. I know that we traditionally have much cheaper steak, wheat, and dairy than other parts of the country given that we're surrounded by millions of acres of farmland for hundreds of miles in all directions and have the benefit of a major energy transfer corridor, giving us some of the cheapest gas and other costs in the nation (sadly, our fruit and fish are much higher for obvious reasons). That might play a role? I'm not sure off the top of my head, I'd need to look into it more. The next time I make it, I'll try to remember to make a special spreadsheet to track each of the cost inputs using the scale on a per ounce basis.

Thanks for the tip on the ascorbic acid. I haven't done that, yet, mostly because we get through it very quickly but I might give that a go. I appreciate that a lot!

As for the color of the bread: Are you using an electric or gas oven? There is a difference in how they cook, with natural gas ovens being "wetter" due to higher humidity, sometimes taking a bit longer to cook. For us, it requires eyeing the recipe more and going by sight but we can control the final product a lot easier. It's a huge difference but requires a bit more of a dance, which makes it feel like an art. In contrast, in my parents' house, they use a brand new, LG electric oven and it's very dry, even heat. (When you open our oven, it feels like a hot day in the tropical-like environment of Orlando, Florida. When you open my parents' oven, it feels like a hot day in the dry Las Vegas desert.) People tend to have some pretty strong preferences either way and certain ovens are better for specific tasks. Whenever we build a house, I imagine we'll install both for just that reason. This person, for example, mentions a local baker who prefers a natural gas oven for his French baguettes because they get that wonderful, beautiful, golden caramelized top. I fall into that category. Sometimes, it can be a challenge if you are making a ball-shaped bread recipe - the moister gas oven causes the outside of the no knead rosemary garlic bread to cook before the inside so I suspect electric would be better for it - but who knows?

When I cook this one in the gas oven, I keep the rack right in the middle of the oven with a second rack inserted right below it to absorb some of the heat. Personally, if it were me and you're reaching "done" earlier than 40 minutes, I'd lower the temperature and try baking it by sight once, instead. Maybe drop it 25 or 50 degrees? You just have to learn the quirks of the oven itself to get it to do exactly what you want.

As for pans, in addition to the commercial ones linked to on this page, we tend to use Goldtouch from Williams-Sonoma, which are really high quality pans, and the Heritage Loaf Pans from Le Creuset, which are more because I feel like cooking in a certain color that day (they aren't as ... I don't know, precise, maybe? as the metal pans. They come out more "arist-y" whereas you'd think the metal cooked breads were made in a commercial kitchen).

If you find any other recipes you like, let me know! We're bread buddies now! I don't know too many people who still make their own around here but once you get used to the scent of it coming from the kitchen, it's hard to go back. It's so much better than the store-bought stuff!

Also, if you ever happen to come across a pan like Panera Bread uses for a certain type of loaf that is almost 9"-12" WIDE by maybe 12" deep, let me know, please. I've been searching forever and haven't found one, yet. For certain types of bread doughs, they seem to be more ideal because the dough is in a much more concentrated area with much larger slices but they are evading me! I'm almost at the point of calling the local Panera restaurant and asking to outright buy one through the business.