Cooking Skyrim: Braided Bread

    The first bread I'll tackle will be Braided Bread, one of the simplest recipes in Skyrim with only Sack of Flour and Salt Pile as ingredients.  Water and yeast are implied, and the quantities are up to me; I'll be basing my recipes on King Arthur's Hot Buttered Pretzels recipe—it's actually very simple and versatile, with the final shape of the dough irrelevant to the ingredients.

    When baking bread, I usually use a packet of dry yeast that needs to be activated with lukewarm water and a teaspoon or so of sugar.  For these recipes (and other Skyrim dough recipes), I use a teaspoon of honey instead of cane sugar, unless otherwise specified.  It's very easy to work with, though anyone with access to sourdough starter or active (wet) yeast should feel free to make substitutions.

Activated yeast in a glass bowl, about ten minutes in.

    The recipe wants two and a half (2.5) cups of flour to one (1) cup of water, a teaspoon of salt, a teaspoon of sugar/honey for the yeast, and a packet of dry yeast.  This isn't exactly the Skyrim recipe, which I guess assumes a sourdough starter (made by mixing whole wheat flour with water), and relies on the yeast to slowly convert wheat starch into sugars rather than providing them up-front.  It takes a good week to grow a sourdough starter, though, even in good conditions, so the dry yeast remains my go-to.

    After activating the yeast in one bowl and measuring out the flour and salt in the other, it only remains to dump the foamy yeast-water mixture into the flour bowl and combine them.  After kneading a little, the dough is set aside to rise for an hour, or until double.

Risen dough in a glass bowl.

    Once it's risen, the dough needs to be kneaded (ha ha), and then comes the braiding.  I have never braided dough in my life, but the Internet tells me I should start from the middle rather than one of the ends, so that's how I'll be doing it.  (It looks like challah braids start from one end instead; it shouldn't really matter to the bake, though.)

A braided loaf, ready to prove.

    I let the braided dough rise again for about an hour, or until double, then popped it in the oven for thirty-five (35) minutes at 350ºF/175ºC.  Since I've used this dough a lot, however, I decided to add unnecessary difficulty by steaming the bread.  This involves placing an oven-safe dish filled with water below the baking sheet and letting the water cook along with the bread.  Best practice is to place the dish in the oven and then pour the water into it with a spouted jug or pitcher, so you don't risk sloshing water everywhere when you move the dish.  The dish should also preheat with the oven, and you'll have to take it out after about twenty (20) minutes, so beware of hot water and steam!

The pan goes under the baking sheet, so the steam rises around the loaf.

    ...Holy crap, I made crusty braided bread!  This is very exciting, as I've never done either of these variations on standard bread before (steamed or braided).  Of course, it is still very plain bread, and works best as a base for spreads, like jam or butter, or used to sop up soups.  It can be made ahead and frozen, then reheated in the oven while wrapped in foil.  I tried it warm with butter, and room-temperature with raspberry preserves.  No complaints from me, and all my testers liked it, though one said it needed more salt.  The only thing I would change would be to bake it at a slightly higher temperature, since when I checked it at thirty-five minutes, it was still very pale and a little underdone.  I gave it another five or so minutes at 375ºF, and that helped somewhat; but for a proper golden-brown crust, I think 375ºF from the start would have been better.

My testers made me use my grandma's china for the pic.

    For the second attempt, I'll be replacing the yeast's water with lukewarm beer.  As I mentioned in another post, Skyrim probably has wheat-beer, and probably uses gruit rather than hops.  I checked the Belgian and German sections at my local dispensary, and found a light-colored wheat-beer that wasn't a lager and wasn't flavored with orange or coriander (both weirdly popular).  We'll see how it works; I'm hoping it will make for a more historical flavor, since ale barm was often used to provide the yeast for bread.

It smelled like a mix of beer and hard cider—not hoppy at all.

    The yeast didn't foam up the way it usually does, and quickly started falling out of suspension; I expect this was due to the alcohol content in the beer, which is more than five (5) percent.  The dough seemed to rise normally—but that may be down to the sourdough discard I added...  The discard isn't at the stage that it should affect the flavor, especially not with commercial baker's yeast in my dough, but I don't want to lead people astray by pretending that drowning the yeast in alcohol won't affect the proof!
   

A very different-looking bowl of yeast...

    As you can see in the photo below, the gluten strands weren't developed enough, and some of the bread "tore" as it expanded.  It looks and smells great, though, and even browned nicely on the outside; this is because I cooked it at 365ºF instead of 350ºF, and it needed only thirty-five (35) minutes.  My loaf came out of the oven with a crust, too, which was surprising—wasn't the point of steam to create a crust where there was none?—so that was unexpected.  Maybe because it was a fairly wet dough thanks to the sourdough discard?  Honestly, I usually use the base recipe for pretzels and rolls (and sometimes pizza crust), so I don't typically interact with the dough as a single loaf over a long baking time; for that, I would probably use an enriched dough, like a modified Stollen recipe.

Wake up babe, new bread dropped.

    In a surprising and disappointing twist, the beer doesn't seem to have influenced the flavor at all.  I'm pretty sure most of the browning is down to the higher temperature, too, rather than any extra sugars in the beer getting caramelized.  My loaf ended up looking like a fat grub, but it tasted fine and had essentially the same texture as the first one.  In fact, I didn't notice any meaningful difference in the crust between this loaf and the steamed one.  (So what was the point of the steaming?!)

    Last but not least, I'll be experimenting with different flours, even though Skyrim seems restricted to wheat.  In medieval Europe, wheat flour was often mixed with that of other grains and pseudocereals, like rye or barley, either to lower the cost or because other grasses were growing in the fields with the wheat.  I'll be replacing one (1) cup of the wheat flour called for in the recipe with other flours, namely half a cup of buckwheat flour and half a cup of oatmeal.  Because of the lack of gluten in alternate flours, the dough won't rise as much, so I'll need to take that into account when making and testing it.

The dough looks okay...

    Initially, the buckwheat made the flour mixture look kind of gray; once I combined it with the water, yeast, and sourdough discard, though, it became a lovely brown dough.  Not sure how that happened.

Still a pretty normal loaf...

    There ended up being more dough than last time, probably because I let it prove longer at every stage, so I had to curve the loaf to fit it on the baking sheet.  I set the oven at 375ºF/175ºC, and the timer for thirty-five (35) minutes.

Oh... er... chonky...

    The, uh, bread had the same "tearing" problem as before, but also spread a lot more and rose a lot less.  Like, a *lot* less.  Sure, it was a wet dough, but the crumb was so tight it looked like I barely proved it!

It's fine, we're fine, ignore the dense bit at the bottom.

    So that's what happens when you replace half a cup of your wheat flour with non-gluten flour, I guess, and also over-prove the dough and have too much moisture.  Hm.

    It tastes fine, though it's a bit stodgy to chew through, and it isn't tall enough to use for sandwiches; but my testers agree that with honey, jam, or butter, it's perfectly good to eat, and no gluten-tolerant hungry person would turn it down.  After toasting, there's very little difference between it and other breads.  I can easily see why, if buckwheat and/or oats were cheaper than flour, many bakers would make a partial substitution to save money without really altering the flavor.

    In an ideal world, I'd just follow the first recipe and bake it at 375ºF/175ºC, which should give me a normal-sized loaf with a good rise, decent crumb structure, and nice browning.  That's certainly what I recommend for anyone else who tries to make Skyrim bread.  I really can't recommend making three different loaves over the course of a week, though.  We have so much bread.  Just... so much.

    Let me know in the comments if you try out the recipe up top, or if you've had better luck working with yeasted buckwheat loaves!