Honey-Oat Pain de Mie

Based on Honey-Oat Pain de Mie from King Arthur Baking. Makes great sandwich bread, toast, and especially French toast!

Ingredients

  • 360g King Arthur Unbleached All-Purpose Flour
  • 2¼ teaspoons instant yeast
  • 89g quick oats
  • 1½ teaspoons (9g) table salt
  • 57g melted butter
  • 59g honey
  • 227g to 252g water lukewarm

Instructions

  1. Combine all of the ingredients, and mix until cohesive. Cover the bowl, and let the dough rest for 15 minutes, to give the oats a chance to absorb some of the liquid. Then knead — by hand, stand mixer, or bread machine — to make a smooth, soft, elastic dough.
  2. Place the dough in a lightly greased bowl, or in an 8-cup measure (so you can track its progress as it rises), and let it rise for 1 to 1½ hours, until it’s risen noticeably. It won’t necessarily double in bulk.
  3. Gently deflate the dough, and shape it into a 9” log. Place the log in a lightly greased 9” pain de mie (pullman) pan, pressing it gently to flatten.
  4. Place the lid on the pan (or cover with plastic wrap, for a better view), and let the dough rise until it’s about 1” below the top of the pan/lid, 60 to 90 minutes. Towards the end of the rising time, preheat the oven to 350°F.
  5. Remove the plastic (if you’ve used it), slide the pan’s lid completely closed, and bake the bread for 30 minutes.
  6. Remove the lid, and bake for an additional 5 minutes, or until an instant-read thermometer inserted into the center registers at least 190°F.
  7. Remove the bread from the oven, and turn it out of the pan onto a rack. Run a stick of butter over the top, if desired; this will yield a soft, buttery crust. Cool completely before cutting; wrap airtight and store for several days at room temperature.

Notes

January 2025: Made this today for the first time, after wanting to try it for quite a while. Because of the dry air, I went toward the higher end for water, using 250g. In step 2, I let the dough rise in a large dough-rising container for 1 hour in the oven with the light on. The high point of the dough was at 800ml when the rise began, and at 1200ml when I took it out. The second rise, on the counter, took 1 hour 15 minutes (I turned on the oven after the first 30 minutes, unsure how long it would take). On this day, the dough could have gone longer; I didn’t get all that much oven spring, and the loaf didn’t completely fill the Pullman pan. I baked it on rack 2 for 20 minutes, then rotated the pan. Baked for 9 more minutes, removed the lid, and baked for 8 more minutes (to achieve the correct internal temperature and a darker color, as the loaf was quite blond at first).