The day was a warm one, a skawcha as they say back east where both me and the recipe for this bread come from. The bread wasted no time rising, and I even had to stick it in the fridge to slow its roll while I ran some errands. The beats I was listening to on wefunkradio.com probably didn't help any, as they were dropping the heat on show 536 with some supa-dope tracks from Lupe Fiasco and J-Live. If any of you reading this like underground hip-hop, there is no better place to find new tracks than wefunkradio.com that I know of. Seriously, do yourself a favor and check it out.
When the bread came out of the oven I realized that I am going to need to up the weight per bread pan since the loaves did not quite make it up and out of the pans as I would have liked them to. These loaves weighed about 1.5 pounds each, so next time I am going to have to try 2-pounders.
As for the taste, it was complex. The bread smelled like molasses while it was baking, so I knew I was in for some good flavor even before it came out of the oven. I ate the end piece first, and it was really crunchy and crackle-y. The flavor of molasses was sharp and strong in the end pieces, as the caramelization of the sugars is concentrated there. The inner pieces were the real treat though.
With the chewing following my first bite of an inner piece the taste of butter was noticeable. Even though there was only a small amount of butter in the recipe, the sweet, creamy flavor of the Plugra butter I had used shone through. As I chewed on, the caramelized flavors from the crust started to work their way in. The variety of flavors doing their thing together was great, and the joys of this bread didn't stop there. There was also the crispness of the crust, the chewiness of the inner crumb, and the little crunchy bits of grits working together to create a unique texture. What an interesting bread! I hope to try it with a different type of molasses next time to see what kind of effect that has.
