With this week’s Twice as Tasty column for the Flathead Beacon, you now have several ways to shape the brioche mother dough I’ve been focused on so far this month. The first technique shapes the dough into round rolls or slightly flatter buns, which bake freeform on a flat pan. You could turn the dough into larger freeform loaves and bake it the way you would Sourdough Cabin Bread, but such a buttery dough can make a melted mess of a baking stone. So the recipe I share this week bakes the dough in loaf pans—and it works particularly well in a covered Pullman pan.

I own two 1.5-pound Pullman pans from different companies. Both have a corrugated bottom and sides to help improve airflow and reduce condensation, but one also has a perforated bottom. When baking sourdough brioche bread and other buttery recipes in the perforated pan, I line it with parchment paper to keep butter from dripping through onto the floor of the oven.

Learn more about baking sourdough in loaf pans and get the complete recipe for Sourdough Brioche Loaves in my column.

You’ll need sourdough starter for my brioche recipes. I’ve teamed up with other fermenters to share sourdough starter, scoby, kefir grains, and more through the Sharing fermented starters Facebook group. Join us in sharing the love of fermentation by becoming a member of the group and offering or requesting starters.

If you’re not a Facebook user, you can contact me with your request for sourdough starter. For a more personal project, learn to make sourdough starter from scratch. Once you start baking, be sure to share your creations.

Make it, share it.
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Twice as Tasty

This week’s column makes it clear that loaf pan size affects the look of breads—and sometimes even whether they are over- or undercooked. But if you only bake occasionally or bought several baking pans and sheets as a complete set, you may not know your loaf pan’s size. Although rectangular and square baking pans are fairly consistent and recipes often specify which to use by their dimensions (9 by 13 inches, 8 by 8 inches, and so on), many bread recipes simply call for a loaf pan, without specifying pan dimensions or another measure of size, like dough weight.

I recently wrote a piece for Allrecipes that delves into the sizes and dimensions of loaf pans. If you look through the specific pans in my Allrecipes article, and the photos of the breads baked in them, you can see that variations in overall size, footprint, and depth produce loaves that appear taller or flatter when filled with the same dough.

For this week’s Sourdough Brioche Loaves, I recommend using the two most common loaf pan sizes: 1-pound pans, which often have interior dimensions of 8.5 by 4.5 by 2.75 inches, or 1.25-pound pans, which usually measure 9 by 5 by 2.75 inches. If you have a small Pullman pan, you can put1.5 or even 1.75 pounds of the brioche mother dough in the pan and bake the rest as rolls.

Here are some of my other favorite loaf pan recipes on the blog. The recipes all recommend 9- by 5-inch (1.25-pound) loaf pans, but you could get away with putting these recipes into 8.5- by 4.5-inch (1-pound) loaf pans. If you’re concerned about overflowing the pans you own, make sure that any quick bread batter fills no more than two-thirds of the pan.

• Cranberry-Orange Quick Bread
• Gingerbread Loaf
• Pumpkin Quick Bread
• Zucchini Bread with Sesame Seeds
• Sourdough Applesauce Walnut Bread in my Making and Using Sourdough Starter guide for The Old Farmer’s Almanac website

I use loaf pans for more than breads. For Taste of Home, I also wrote about a delicious lentil loaf that I top with Vegan Memphis-Style Barbecue Sauce. Get the lentil loaf recipe in this article.

Need starter? Join the Sharing fermented starters Facebook group to request sourdough starter, scoby, kefir grains, and more, any time of year. If you are not a Facebook user, contact me by January 31, 2025, with your request for sourdough starter.