siblingbakery

Ashley: Portuguese Corn Bread (Broa)

This recipe calls for corn flour and I wasn’t sure what to do about that. I have masa flour which is for making tortillas and what not, but I know that the corn has been treated with lime so I was really scared what it might do to the bread. I ended up using it, but also spent time researching corn flour and there is corn flour out there without lime. So one day I will try that out, but for now the masa worked just fine.

One of the steps in making this bread is to make a cornstarch mixture that’s heated, which when cooled is a very thick clear gel. (You can see in the above photo the gel, which I dumped on top of the flour before mixing in.) Wasn’t sure how this was going to work out but it seemed to blend into the dough just fine. The recipe says that this dough is softer than other doughs but I found mine to be somewhere between normal to maybe even a bit stiff. The dough also seemed to kind of “break” when I was kneading it so I worried that the gluten wasn’t being properly formed during kneading.

Shaped and dusted with flour, waiting to proof.

Proofed. You can see the fine lines that have developed in the flour (well some of them aren’t so fine!) I love how this looks. I think these lines are one of the important factors in how broa is supposed to look.

Once the bread was baked and had cooled a bit, I couldn’t wait any longer so I started to slice off a small piece and was scared that it was in fact a big rock because it was really hard to saw through but NO! It was not a rock. In fact the bread has the most gloriously thick and crunchy crust (loooooooove crusts like this) and the inside – oh the inside! It’s like the poundcake of breads. Dense and so so soft. As for the taste? A mix between white bread and corn tortillas. I can’t wait to make this one again. Sadly this bread didn’t turn out so well for Adam.