Giraffe/Tiger Bread and Bready, Steady, Go! - September Linky

It's my turn once again to host the Bready, Steady, Go! linky and I can't wait to see all the delicious bakes.

My 3 daughters are heading back to school this week and to ease some of the inevitable nerves at getting back to routine, we baked a couple of loaves to make school lunch sandwiches with.

We baked a plain white round loaf topped with cheese, it was delicious! We of course taste tested it, and the second loaf, quality control is very important.

The second loaf we made was a long loaf topped with a paste to give the top of the bread a cracked appearance.  This is called Tiger Bread or Giraffe Bread.  It is very simple to make and bake.  I was given the topping paste recipe by a baker friend, he scaled it down for me from his usual bulk/commercial quantities.

Tiger/Giraffe Bread

500g strong white bread flour
2 tsp salt, I sometimes use garlic salt for more flavour
7g sachet instant yeast
2 Tblsp oil, I used sunflower as that's what we had
1 tsp sugar
275ml - 300ml lukewarm water

Topping
1 sachet instant yeast
4 Tblsp/60ml water, or more if needed
1 tsp sugar
2 tsp oil

1 or 2 tsp onion powder
60g rice flour

Put the flour into a large bowl.  Measure the salt and sugar on one side of the bowl and pour the sachet of yeast onto the other side of the bowl.  You don't want the yeast and salt to meet until the liquid is added.  Add the oil to the water and pour into the bowl, mixing until a soft dough forms, either with a stand mixer or by hand.

Once a dough forms, knead until smooth and elastic.  This usually takes 10 minutes by hand and around 5 minutes in the stand mixer with a dough hook fitted.

Put the dough into a lightly oiled bowl, cover with clingfilm and leave until doubled in size.  Mix together the topping ingredients and leave to stand for 15 - 20 minutes before spreading onto the top of your loaf.  Add a little more water if necessary to get a spreadable consistency.

Knock back the dough then shape into a long rugby ball shape.  Put onto a baking tray lined with non stick baking paper.  Spread the dough with the topping paste and leave to prove, uncovered, for around 30 - 40 minutes.  

Whilst the dough is proving, preheat your oven to 220C Fan/240C/Gas Mark 9/475F.

Bake the bread for 10 minutes to get a good oven spring then turn your oven down to 180C Fan/200C/Gas Mark 6/400F and bake for another 10 - 15 minutes.  When properly cooked through, the bread should sound hollow when tapped on the base.  Leave to cool on a wire rack.

Now it's your turn! Link up all of your delicious yeasted bread bakes.

The Rules:

Bready Steady Go! will run from 1st until the 28th of each month and then a round up will be posted by the hosting blog, which is me this month, at the end of the month.

You can link up any yeasted bread recipe, sometimes we may also run themed challenges, and feel free to join in with other challenges if your post also meets their guidelines. If you really love baking bread then you can add multiple entries up to a maximum of 3 per blog each month.

Please link back to Jen’s Food, and this post, and include the badge to help spread the word.

We’d prefer to see entries from new blog posts where possible but you can also link up old posts if you add the badge and link back to our blogs as well.

You can tweet your entries to @JensFood and @UtterlyScrummy using the hashtag #breadysteadygo and we will retweet all that we see.

All entries will also pinned to our new Pinterest board as they come in.

If you make a recipe from a book/magazine/website etc please respect copyright and do not reproduce the recipe verbatim. Instead of copying out the recipe from the book, describe it in your own words and if it’s from an online source please link to the original content rather than copying full recipe.

So what are you waiting for?! Bready, Steady, Go bake some bread!

An InLinkz Link-up