Newfoundland Bread

So, I guess it was only a matter of time, but last night I decided that I would have to give Newfoundland Bread (AKA Pepsi bread) a try this morning.

As my brief search of the internet didn't turn up any recipes I had to design something myself. Given that this is my first try, I thought that I would stick to a relatively simple recipe/approach - basically my normal approach to white bread but with Pepsi (meaning that no sugar would be needed).

For those of you who are interested, the recipe I settled on eventually was as follows:

1 tin of Pepsi (room temperature)
maybe 2 teaspoons of yeast
maybe 2 tablespoons of butter
about 4 cups of flour

The Pepsi was poured into a large mixing bowl. The yeast and butter were then added to the Pepsi. The flour, basically enough to make a sturdy dough, was added and then kneaded until the dough was relatively firm. The dough was then set aside to rise. I put the dough in a warm oven to help speed things up. Once rise, the dough should be again kneaded and then formed and placed in the desired baking vessel. Bake at 350 F until done.

It should be noted that this does not appear to be a fast rising bread, I am starting to think that the Pepsi may have reacted badly with the yeast. I guess this outcome isn't too surprising. For a while I was thinking that I should consider using flat Pepsi - but then I decided to just go for it and see what happened.

Another thing that I feel that I should note is that throughout the entire process the dough has had something of a distinct smell. Basically, as far as I can tell, this is a Pepsi in dough smell and nothing particularly odd. That being said, I did expect that this smell might have dissipated during the baking process.

Fortunately, strange smells aside, the bread seems to have turned out quite nicely. The resulting loaf is very well formed and pleasant looking. Did I not know that the bread had Pepsi at its core I wouldn't be able to sense that their was anything unusual about this loaf of bread.

Of course, the entire process was also documented on film (or the inexpensive digital version of film) and then turned into a "how to" video so that the entire world will have the inside dope on how to make this recipe.



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While this dough was rising Neil, Rebecca and I were sitting around thinking about other variations on this theme. Both of them seemed to like the idea of energy drink bread. So, if they are lucky, we may have another ridiculous batch of bread coming our way shortly.