About this recipe

Batch loaf – slightly sweet bread has a bit more sugar than most round breads I’ve come across, but still has the texture of a bread. It makes great toast, and freezers well.

Origin of the recipe

If you haven’t seen any of my other posts, this is Bread #3 of Paul Hollywood’s 100 Great Breads. I’ve been baking each of his recipes because a) I’m a HUGE Great British Bake Off fan, b) Bread is delicious, and c) What else is there to do during ten months of Corona Virus lockdown but bake bread? The loaf is slightly sweeter than the others I’ve made so far and it takes sort of like Hawaiian rolls, without the Wonder Breadish texture.

My time is limited since I teach high school all week long, and on Saturday morning I really wanted to remake yummy Loaf Bread #8 Irish Soda Bread , since I’d eaten the last of it the night before. Irish soda bread is quick, easy, and makes such delicious toast. But I had papers to grade and lessons to plan. This Batch Loaf recipe seemed pretty straightforward, so I slogged on.

Paul Hollywood writes that batch bread was a “very old British recipe” mainly baked during the 18th century. I guess they liked a slightly sweeter bread back then.

Baking the bread

This batch loaf recipe was pretty easy to understand. The only changes I made was to switch instant yeast for the fresh yeast Paul calls for in his recipe, and to use my Kitchen Aid mixer. I’ve baked bread without it my whole life, but now that I can finally afford one, I adore it. Instant yeast is used for all my recipes because I bought literally two pounds of it during our food shortage period in June, 2020. I ordered some from Amazon, then saw it in the grocery store–for the first time in a while–and bought it. So here I am with a lifetime supply of instant yeast in my freezer and a fierce determination to use it up before it goes bad.

One bit of confusion

When you’ve been baking bread your entire life like Paul Hollywood, I guess you assume your cookbook readers will simply know how to do certain things and that they don’t need to be explained. The recipe says to add more flour if the dough sticks too much the counter, but if you add too much more it will tighten the loaf. You can see that it was like kneading chewing gum, but was it sticking too much?

Then recipe says to let the dough rest for an hour, then shape in a ball and rise for 1-2 hours. One or two hours?? Is it optional? If not, how will I know it’s ready to bake? I went for middle ground and baked it one and one-half hours.