ABC - Honey Oatmeal Bread

We haven't baked any yeast recipes for ABC lately. With the beginning of the fall season, this Honey Oatmeal Bread couldn't have been more perfect. The dough for this bread was super easy. No complicated steps or hard to find ingredients. The end result: a perfect loaf for delicious sandwiches (I even enjoyed it plain!). Definitely a recipe to bake over and over again. You can find the recipe in The Weekend Baker by Abby Dodge.

A slice of oat-y goodness!

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I made the dough in the bread machine, using the Dough cycle. After a brief 20 minute wait to let the oats soften in the hot milk, I added the remaining ingredients and pushed the "go" button on the machine. A little less than 90 minutes later, I was shaping the dough.

About 35 minutes later, the loaf was in the oven. It was  a hot day, so the second rise didn't take that long, even with my reduced yeast amount (1.5 tsp instant yeast).

One of my mistakes (that's what happens when you're in a rush) was not to realize that the loaf might not need a full 40 minutes in the oven, or to at least tent the loaf. As Janis mentions in her post, bread recipes with a large amount of sugar and milk brown fast. Unfortunately I wasn't home to check on the loaf while it was baking. Hubby was in charge of removing the loaf from the oven after the alarm went off, 40 min later. It was fine, just  a tad darker than I prefer. It didn't taste burned though.

Final thoughts/tips:

• Hubby and I loved the bread. It was soft and moist with a wonderfully sweet flavor from the honey. I used an orange blossom honey which was great. Those 2 slices in the picture were gone pretty quickly (I ate them plain! Yum!). I loved the crunchy the exterior against the soft interior of the bread. I had a couple slices again today with some fig butter from Trader Joe's. Yum! Although the crust had softened, it still tasted great. I sliced up the rest of the loaf and froze it.
• My changes to the recipe were: use half bleached AP flour and half bleached bread flour, reduce yeast to 1.5 tsp, reduce salt to 1 tsp, add 1 oz non-fat dry milk powder, substitute butter with 1.5 oz oil, substituted whole milk with 1% milk.
• I typically like to substitute some of the "white" flour with whole wheat flour, but after making the aforementioned changes, I thought I'd better not tempt fate (too much), ha ha.
• Don't forget to check out the other ABC bakers.