soft non-crusty white bread?

[siduri]

My experience is that eggs make bread dry unless you use egg yolks (the whites dry the bread or cake) ... but....
MILK softens everything, from meatloaf to cake to bread. substitute water with warm milk.
BUTTERMILK works even better
cold butter in slices, kneaded in AFTER the bread is kneaded, will make it high and soft
a bit of honey makes bread soft - if you don;t mind the sweetness - one or two tbsp
finally, i cover the bread with a cloth when it comes out of the oven (and out of the pan) when i want a soft crust. the steam in the bread keeps the crust soft.
I also like certain kinds of breads soft (I live in italy where all the bread is crusty, and i do miss a soft loaf). It doesn;t mean wanting it to taste and feel like the characterless stuff that's mass produced in the US, but it can be a very good soft and crustless bread.

[bhaskar_adeeb]

dear ms.fawkes,

i use the following recipe for soft rolls and bread and its a hit !

Flour 1000 gms
Yeast fresh 30 gms
Salt 25 gms
Eggs 4 nos
Milk powder 75 gm
Butter 100 gm
Water (to form a soft dough generallly anywhere between 400-500 ml)
Sugar 40 gms

Bake it at high temp around 230-240 Deg C for 5-7 mts for rolls and 200 Deg C for 35-40 mts for loaves(brush the bread with butter after baking to make them soft)

hope it works for you...

[felixe the dog]

Just to put in my 2 cents.
I am noticing that in some of the posts that "milk" is being proposed as an enriching agent to "soften" the bread.
Be aware that if you add milk or milk products that they should be denatured to ensure that the dough develops properly.
Milk proteins will interfere with gluten development, this is why bakers milk powder has been heat treated.
You can do this yourself, warm the milk - raising the temperature to around 85 degrees celcius and holding the "core temperature (use a probe) of the milk at this temperature for 30 minutes.

[bhaskar_adeeb]

thnks , that was quite an information....

[siduri]

Yeah, they call it "scalding" the milk. I know that's the purpose of it, but wondered if that's necessary when you have pasteurized milk. Some books say it's not. I never wanted to take the chance.
However buttermilk or yoghurt doesn;t have this problem. In fact, you shouldn't heat them, but you can make them warm by using half and half hot water and one of these fermented milks. They make for a very good rise and soft bread, and very good taste.

[felixe the dog]

"Scalding" the milk, is a misleading term. If all you had to do was scald it then pasteurization would be sufficient - but it isn't.
As I posted before it requires the milk to be held at a sufficient temperature for an adequate time period to ensure the milk protiens are denatured. There are numerous theory books on baking that will give a "food science" logic to what I mentioned.
You can still go ahead and just add milk from the carton but you would have to vary your percentages of yeast, gluten, yeast foods (sugars) and bread improvers to compensate and still have to contend with a temperamental dough and most likely a so so product.
This is from a commercial baking perspective, if all you do is bake at home or make small batches in a kitchen then how you approach this is entirely at your discretion.
Good luck!
( I decided that today I like to use smileys!!

[siduri]

No doubt baking for a bakery is a different business, you don't want to take chances and can lose entire batches and lots of money for a small mistake but i've been baking bread for many many years (maybe at least 35) and i'd say that for the last 15 i have never made a bread that didn't come high and fully raised and soft, even using 100% whole wheat flour with no white flour added, except when i make white bread of course. While cake baking is very much chemistry, bread baking is mainly mechanics. Develop the gluten with good kneading, treat the gluten strands well, make sure they turn around the loaf and don't break with "punching down" the dough, fold over when you rest it, and when you form the loaf. I learned the technique from Laurel's kitchen bread book, (15 years ago, when my bread became foolproof) and i have to say her technique is amazing. Most (all) cookbooks i have except that one say you can't make bread with 100% whole wheat flour, if you want a decent rise and not a brick, but using the laurel's kitchen technique has brought me no fail bread every time. Every time. Another good advice she gives for making high rise, soft, whole wheat bread is to knead in the cool slices of butter AFTER having kneaded the bread and produced the gluten, because it greases the gluten strands and you can actually incorporate a large quantity of butter and produce an even higher and lighter bread! against all advice from other cookbooks.
I notice lots of professional bakers stand by their precise measurements and temperature guides, but i hardly even measure ingredients to make bread any more, and never use any kind of a thermometer. For many years my gas oven thermostat was broken and the repair man putb in an on off switch, so that there was no regulating the temp at all and it just kept getting hotter. The bread was fine anyway, i used something in the door to keep it just a little open and the temp was ROUGHLY ok, but it worked.

[felixe the dog]

Giddyup!!