The Best Thing Since Sliced Bread
Setting the Scene
It's 9 am on a perfect Saturday morning. The birds are singing as you roll out of your soft bed. Donning a silk robe, you waltz into your well-appointed kitchen. You grab a slice of soft, supple bread, and drop in your trusty toaster while you turn on the TV to catch some toons.
A short while later... Ding.
Your bread has now matured into beautiful, hot toast. You go to the fridge to get some butter. But, ... oh no, to your utter horror you realize that you are completely out of butter. Now your dreams of delicious, buttery toast.... are toast. Your whole weekend... ruined. Dang.
As you stare brokenhearted at your lightly burnt bread square, you spiral into a state of deep introspection. If only you had thought ahead. If only you had baked bread so buttery that no additional post-toasting butter was needed. If only you had: self-buttered-bread.
Method
This recipe is based on a standard, highly-rated bread machine recipe: https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/17215/best-bread-machine-bread/
However, to pack as much butter flavor into the loaf as humanly possible, our team of scientists replaced the water with liquid butter substitute spray, and the oil with melted butter. Brilliant, we know.
To ensure that the dough was sufficiently hydrated to form a coherent loaf, an additional 1/4 cup of water was added (adjust to your needs). Additionally, previous tests made it apparent that a dough with this much oil content does not rise enough to yield a suitably fluffy loaf, so the amount of yeast in the standard recipe was doubled. The final procedure is below.
Ingredients
- Butter Substitute Spray - 1 cup/bottle (www.icantbelieveitsnotbutter.com/products/original-butter-spray/)
- Water - 1/4 cup
- White Sugar - 2 tbsp
- Instant Dry Yeast - 2 x 0.25 ounce packets
- Butter - 1/4 Cup melted and cooled
- All Purpose Flour - 3 cups
- Salt - 1 tsp
- Bread machine (or knead it yourself for some bonus exercise)
Procedure
- Heat the butter spray to 110 F and add to your bread machine pan
2. Stir in the sugar and yeast and let sit for 5 minutes
3. Add melted butter, salt, and flour
4. Set bread machine for a medium loaf and desired crust; begin kneading
5. Add water gradually until a uniform elastic dough ball is formed
6. Remove loaf and allow to cool
7. Slice
8. Toast
9. Revel in your culinary brilliance and butter engineering accomplishments
10. Decide what to do with all that time you've saved by not having to butter your toast...
Results
This actually worked much better than expected. The double yeast resulted in a well-risen loaf with a texture similar to the original butter-less recipe. The baking phase also makes your entire kitchen smell of melted butter for hours. Popping a slice of this loaf in the toaster results in instant warm, buttery, crispy goodness.
A Note on Caloric Content
If you don't read the fine print, the butter spray contains 0 calories per spray. My engineering team tells me that 1 bottle * 1130 sprays/bottle * 0 calories/spray = 0 calories. Therefore, this is a great recipe for those on a diet! However, I feel obligated to tell you that the fine print online says that 6 sprays = 5 calories (go figure). Taking this into account: 1 bottle * 1130 sprays/bottle * 5 calories/6 sprays = 942 calories. But, considering your going to get at least a dozen slices out of this magnificent loaf, adding an entire bottle of butter substitute spray only adds an extra 78 calories per slice. Of course there's also the 407 calories worth of melted butter (34 cal/slice), 96 calories of sugar (8 cal/slice), and the 1743 calories ( 145 cal/slice) of flour. That's a grand total of 265 calories per slice. For reference, a single frosted strawberry pop-tart is 200 calories. So I'd advise using some of your huge quantity of saved toast-buttering time to hit the treadmill. Or, you know, just don't read the fine print.
Future Work
Develop a partnership with Colin Furze to sell every loaf of self-buttered bread with a toasting bread knife. Then you wake up, cut your bread loaf, and bam! Hot buttered toast in an instant!