Happy Spring!

Every year growing up, my mom made Easter bread, or Spring bread.  So, carrying on with tradition, I have made this bread every year.  It is more and more fun as the girls get older.  This year,  I used a new recipe that I have come to LOVE and we used gel food coloring, so the colors are much more vibrant instead of pastel.  It's really simple to make, though a little time consuming.  First make the bread.  Here's the recipe:

WHITE BREAD

2 cups very warm water

¼ cup sugar
4 ½ tsp yeast

½ cup oil

2 ½ tsp salt

5-6 cups bread flour

3 Tbs gluten

Food coloring (for spring bread)

Proof yeast in water and sugar. (If you don't know what it means to proof yeast, combine your water and sugar in a mixing bowl and sprinkle in yeast.  Mix together and let sit until yeast becomes very bubbly, foamy, or whatever you want to call it.  Once it is that way, continue with the recipe.  If it never gets to that foamy point after 10 minutes, then your yeast is bad.  Don't waste the rest of the ingredients on bad yeast.)  Add oil, salt, 4 cups flour, and gluten. Add more flour as needed until dough is soft but not too sticky.  Knead slowly for 2 minutes in between flour additions.  Spray bowl and place dough in it, turning to coat. Cover and let rise until double. Punch down, shape into loaves, and place in greased loaf pans. Bake at 325°F for 40 minutes or until golden brown on top and sides. Remove from pans and let cool on wire racks. 

Now, the debate.  Is bread flour necessary?  No.  You can do just fine with all-purpose flour.  However, if you want melt in your mouth deliciousness, use bread flour.  And for the secret ingredient, also use vital wheat gluten.  If you are using all-purpose flour, add one tablespoon gluten for every cup of flour you use.  Bread flour, on the other hand, already has gluten added to the flour, so you don't need as much.  However, I have found that adding a little more gluten to bread flour makes it extra special. 

I learned that when you are making bread, you want it to pull away from the sides but NOT the bottom after you've added your flour.  Slowly add the flour a half cup at a time and let it knead for 2 minutes in between each addition.  If there is not enough flour, after a little bit of kneading, it will start sticking to the sides again.  So you can add a little more.  But if you just keep dumping flour in, you will end up adding too much and the dough will either be tough or dry.  Almost all bread is delicious right out of the oven, but the goal is to have it delicious a couple days later...if it lasts that long.  The texture of this bread should be the most lucious thing you have ever felt, very elastic.

Now, to make it colored bread, you can either add the dye to the water/yeast mixture or you can knead it in after.  If you add it to the water, you will have enough dough to make 3 loaves of just that color.  So you'd have to make additional batches for the other colors, potentially ending up with enough dough to make 18 loaves of bread.  I don't know about you, but I didn't want to make that much bread.  So I made two batches, broke them into 6 separate balls and added my dye to each ball.  Kneading in the colors took a lot of elbow grease and time, but it was worth not having to make that many batches.  Do what you want.

Now, to make the bread.  I divided each color into four equal shaped balls.  Roll out one ball of each color into a long snake. 

 Next you press the tops of the snakes together.

Now, start braiding.  In the above example, take the red one, over the green, under the purple, over the yellow, under the pink, and over the blue. 

Continue doing this, making sure to scoot the color you are braiding in all the way against the one above it so the braid is tight.

When you are finished, tuck the ends together. 

Usually, the loaf ends up being longer than your pan.  So you have a few choices.  You can squish it into your pan.  It doesn't end up as pretty, but you'll have more bread per loaf.  Or you can fold it in half on top of itself.  I think it makes it too big, but maybe you want that.  What I did was cut off the part that was too long and put it in other pans, since I have 3 different sized pans.  That worked well for me.  But you can decide what you want to do and it WILL work!!

Now, bake it at 325 degrees for 40 minutes and take the loaves out of the pans immediately.  All bread is best right out of the oven, so go ahead and have some!

If you don't want to make colored bread, just use the above recipe for the best white bread you've ever had.

Now, you'll need the recipe for the best strawberry mango jam ever made.  Ahh...pure deliciousness.