Another month, another Daring Bakers’ challenge!  For March, it was Dutch Crunch Bread!  Booya!

Sara and Erica of Baking JDs were our March 2012 Daring Baker hostesses! Sara & Erica challenged us to make Dutch Crunch bread, a delicious sandwich bread with a unique, crunchy topping. Sara and Erica also challenged us to create a one of a kind sandwich with our bread!

This challenge was a lot of fun; I’d never heard of dutch crunch bread before so it was, as usual, super fun to try out.

There’s something super soothing about simple, white bread.  It’s pretty to watch rise, cathartic to knead, and deliciously bad for your when you eat it with lots of butter (or not).  I mean, what is there to dislike about this?

Don’t you just want to put your hand into that and give it a squeeze?  Insert innuendos here!

But dutch crunch bread doesn’t stop there – after your dough rises you then slather it in a bizarre concoction of yeast, rice flour, sugar and water.  This yields an oddly viscous substance that you slap onto each loaf and roll you shape in the hopes that it will mysteriously turn your bread into something resembling a giraffe.  Wonderfully, if you can follow basic directions (debatable for me) this actually turns out pretty well!

I actually had to dilute my topping slightly further with water, as I didn’t initially get the desired consistency.

Voila!

Then, as I mentioned before, I liberally slapped the topping onto the bread itself.  The DB directions warned several times that if you don’t put enough topping on, you don’t get the desired pattern.  Easy enough: more == better.  I decided to make 1 loaf and 3 rolls; the rolls I used in last week’s Coffee Bacon Sandwiches!

I’m pretty sure the only mistake I made when making this bread is that I should’ve rotated it when it was in the oven; looking at the way the rolls and loaf came out, it was clear which side had been in the back of my oven and which had been in the front.  But small potatoes, considering what could have happened (I dunno, I could’ve set my oven on fire or something.  Or forgotten to add yeast.  Not that I’ve ever done that before >.>)!

As far as the taste goes…I wasn’t sure that I tasted much of a difference.  Even the supposed crunch I was supposed to get int he texture didn’t seem to show up to me.  It could be because I waited 1-2 days to eat it that it wasn’t as crispy as it was supposed to be, but even so I found it “meh”.  It’s not that it tasted bad – not at all – but rather didn’t taste like anything special.  Did anybody else find a big taste difference?  Maybe I did something wrong!

It was still a lot of fun to bake, though; if someone asked me to bake some up for them, I definitely would.  It’s straight-forward and good lookin’ – my favorite type of recipe!

Dutch Crunch Bread

Check it out here!