Portuguese Sweet Bread

This week I decided to make some Portuguese Sweet Bread.  It is sometimes called Hawaiian bread due to its popularity there.  The recipe for this once again came from Peter Reinhart’s The Bread Baker’s Apprentice. 

This bread is somewhat rich from the butter and egg.  It is also a little citrusy.  The bread is good on its own, but makes for some outstanding French toast.

This is the mise en place for the sponge for the bread.

First, the dry ingredients go into a bowl and mixed.

The sponge gets water added and mixed together.

The sponge sits for an hour or two until its extremely bubbly and ready to collapse onto itself.

This is the mise en place for the dough, minus salt.

The butter, sugar, and dry milk are measured and ready for mixing.

Then they all get creamed together.

The eggs and extracts get mixed into the butter until smooth.

Then the bread flour gets kneaded in for about 10 minutes.  It should pass the windowpane test, when the dough can be spread out so that you can see through it.

The dough shaped into a ball and set in an oiled bowl.  It then has to ferment for about two hours.

At that point, the dough get “punched down” and reshaped into a ball.  It then gets placed into an oiled pie tin and left on the counter to proof for another two hours.

Here is a shot of the dough, with the skin pulled tight.

After the proofing period, it gets brushed with egg wash and baking in the oven for 50 minutes.

After baking, the crust gets a deep mahogany brown.

And here is a final shot of the bread in slices.