Tuesdays with Dorie: Kugelhopf

Yolanda of The All-Purpose Girl choose this week’s Tuesday with Dorie recipe: Kugelhopf. I read through the recipe and I thought that it would be good. I don’t often bake with yeast, but I have in the past and have always had good luck. I didn’t have a Kugelhopf pan, so I figured that I would just use my Bundt pan.

I read through the recipe and calculated all the time it would take to make this, and it was a lot! I wasn’t sure when I would make it that I would have enough time, but then I remembered that Tuesday was a holiday. I thought I could make it on Tuesday, but I don’t usually like to wait until the last minute. (I’m a librarian; I’m all about being organized.) Luckily, I ended up having enough time to make this a couple of days in advance.

This recipe gives you the option of refrigerating the dough overnight. I didn’t do that and I was still ok. I knew that the Bundt pan that I was using was larger than the recipe called for, so I had to take that into consideration with watching the rising.

My dough came together nicely, although I have to say that this is the strangest bread that I have ever made in that it calls for less than 2 cups of flour. There wasn’t a lot of dough for my dough hook to work with, but it was ok. The first rising took a little longer than expected, but it wasn’t all that warm in the house. I deflated the dough and refrigerated it. Once I finally put the dough into the pan to rise, the house had warmed up and the dough rose well. For the final rising time, I went more by the time specified in the recipe than any sort of visual cue. My pan was bigger so I knew the dough wouldn’t rise to the top of the pan.

Mine didn’t rise any more during the baking time, which I think was ok. It came cleanly out of the pan and the structure of the dough was nice. From start to finish took 7 hours, which was a long time for eggy bread with raisins. My husband and I enjoyed the pieces we ate. I’ll use the rest for bread pudding, which I think will be great!