Question for home bread makers - Tiger bread

hi,
has anyone had any success with the tiger bread recipes here.
i just luurrvve tesco tiger bread and it would be great to be able to make this at home.
thanks
molly
xx

After some experimentation, I think I’ve solved how to make a tiger crust on bread using a Panasonic breadmaker.

First what didn’t work. The reader who was told by her supermarket to use sesame paste was misled. I tried sesame paste (tahini) and it produced a soft oily crust that wasn’t very nice.

Then I tried the elaborate paste recipe referred to by several readers using scaled down quantities. This partly worked but I couldn’t understand what the yeast, sugar and oil were supposed to be doing.

After all, the principle must be that rice flour contains no gluten and as the paste cannot expand as the bread dough is proving, it cracks.

Time to apply Occam’s Razor (don’t multiply contingencies unnecessarily – never failed me yet). So I excluded all ingredients that appeared to serve no useful purpose.

So here it is. Mix together 2 tablespoons rice flour, 2 tablespoons water and a good pinch of salt. Rice flour may be purchased in health food shops in the Gluten-free section.

Set up the breadmaker to make a loaf. With the Panasonic, set the browning control to D (dark crust).

One and a half hours before the bread is due to finish, paint the rice paste evenly over the surface of the dough using a soft pastry brush. At this time in the program, the breadmaker has finished kneading but the dough has not started to rise, thus giving maximum time for the rice glaze to crack.

This gives a really nice cracked crusty surface to the loaf.

I am too lazy to make bread by hand, so it would be interesting if someone who does could try this mix on their bread.

The point is, there is no oil at all in it. Just rice flour, water and a bit of salt.

To be honest, I think the sesame flavour thing is a bit of a red herring. If you really like the added flavour of sesame, you could try sprinkling sesame seed on top of the rice flour glaze.

I regularly top loaves with seeds (sesame or poppy) using the Panasonic breadmaker. Do this just before the bread is due to start cooking i.e. 1 hour before finish. Use a small hand pump sprayer (available from garden centres) to spray the surface of the loaf with water, then sprinkle the seeds over. The moisture helps the seeds to stick.

dearauntie wrote: »

Coming to this debate rather late, but turned up the thread as I was trying to discover how to make tiger bread.
If the answer is a combination of brushing the crust with some variety of paste, and sesame oil, why not, just before baking begins, lightly brush with tahini, or if that isn't available, thinned houmous - both will give you a paste that may crack and a sesame flavour. Mine's rising now. I'll report back.

I've not been back to this thread for more than 2 years!!! I'll be interested to see how your experiment works out

I've got a proper oven installed now, so I might do a little experimenting myself