And the taste?
Delicious. A bit chewier than normal. Which to be fair might be because I did six strand instead of 4. Forgot to mention that before.
I enjoyed the cinnamon part the most.
Well it looks great and honey has a very special place in my heart/stomach, so your post had me very curious. While I didn’t taste it, MASTERFUL JOB!!
Thank you. Got some ideas for the next set.
Is this challah? It looks delicious!
It is. Thank you for your kind words.
My preferred honey for sugar replacement in most bread is chestnut honey. It’s really weird tasting and I don’t really like it for anything else, but for some reason it’s absolutely amazing baked in bread.
Chatgpt suggests that it would be a good idea to use chestnut honey with nuts like walnut incorporated in the dough. Thoughts?
Hell yeah walnuts are a fav and I can see that working. I’ve used chestnut honey it for everything from sandwich bread to pizza dough and even doughnuts and it hasn’t let me down. Sweet and savoury recipes have both been consistently enjoyable and made me burn through the honey super fast. In my family we use cotton bread bags and the odd time we don’t finish it before it starts to get hard, we toast it and make ice cream sandwiches with real bread, in a bowl because it drips a lot when the bread is hot. Maple walnut ice cream sandwich with chestnut honey generic loaf was one of the highest rated among friends and family. IIRC it was something along the lines of Joe’s basic sandwich bread recipe which suggested increasing the honey amount so I doubled it for that oven fresh bread inhaler experience.
Did the rise time change for this? In my very unscientific experiments I did see changes that seemed to correlate to overall hydration levels. Higher hydration = faster rise, lower hydration = slower rise vs. just using sugar.
And was it chewier?
Chewier yes I think it rose a bit faster. Usually my second rise is 1.5 hours but this one was ready about 1.25 or so.
I think honey will be the way I will go moving forward.
Interesting thanks for that.
My pet theory is that higher hydration levels contribute to faster yeast development with honey because yeast is able to utilize the simple sugars in honey more readily. At lower hydration levels the yeast is limited by lack of water.
I would love to take a class on this stuff. Feel like I am muddling around when there is a whole science already developed.
Well I really enjoy your posts.
It has been awhile since I looked but I couldn’t find much about using honey except as a flavor agent. Most research is geared towards large production. About the only thing there did seem to be research on, albeit fringe, was in the context of historical breads. Ancient Mesopotamian, Egyptian, etc. Well before sugar was available that far west.