Basic White Loaf - Jo Wheatley P. 163

I've decided to do a little side series working through different recipes for white bread and see which is our favourite. I've already made one from Mary Berry's book, blog here, so I decided that this week I'd try one from Jo Wheatley's Book. I try and make all of our bread now so this gives me plenty of opportunity to try out the differing recipes. 

This recipe makes a loaf using 500g of bread flour, which for me seems like a small loaf but I think that's probably a standard size. It has the usual convential ingredients.. flour, salt, sugar, yeast, butter and water. This recipe has an extra ingredient that I've never seen in bread before (except bread machine mixes).. milk. The recipe states to use whole milk but in this flat we only have semi skimmed so I used that instead. 

Like most recipes it involves mixing all the dry ingredients together in a bowl. 

Dry ingredients mixed together

I then had to add the milk and water together and heat them up. The butter was added to this and melted and then this mixture was added to the dry ingredients. Usually I don't measure out the water and just add as much as I think is needed, however, this recipe had the butter and milk included so I thought I'd better add them. It turn out to be exactly the right amount. The mixture was slightly dry but once it was turned out onto the side and kneaded this made it perfect and I didn't even need any extra flour on the surface during kneading. The dough was rolled into a ball and placed in a lightly oiled bowl for 1 hour.

Dough is rolled into a ball and ready to prove

Once the dough has doubled in size it's knocked back and kneaded for 1 minute. It is then placed in an oiled loaf tin and left to rise for 1 hour before baking. The recipe stated that it should be cooked for 30mins but I did it for 38mins like I usually do. As soon as the bread was cooked I got it out of the tin and left it to cool. 

Loaf out the tin and cooling

 Once cooled I sliced some for my lunch and gave it the taste test. I was impressed at the texture inside the loaf, perfect. 

Sliced bread, great texture inside

Verdict: I really enjoyed this bread and thought it had a lovely taste and texture to it. It tasted lighter than the Mary Berry loaf and is a more useful size. However, I'm aware that the loaf has milk in it and it looks likely that little M&M has a milk allergy/intolerance, therefore I won't be able to make this loaf once she is old enough to eat it. It may be worth investigating in future using alternative cows milk free milk, but that's for another time.