South African Steamed Bread - This is a pale, soft bread that tastes kind of like sourdough. I picked three variations of the recipe to test. This is the first one. #cookingathome #cookwithsteam 

South African Steamed Bread - part 1

For the last little while, I've set aside the oven in favour of the steamer. I'm very familiar with Asian style steamed cakes and bread but I wanted to try something different. I came across some web sites featuring South African cuisine and they listed recipes for steamed bread. I picked three of them to test out.

This is a pale, soft bread. It tastes kind of like sourdough without the time and hassle required to make one. I scaled down the recipes and made all three versions at the same time so that I could compare them. They all use the same ingredients, just in different quanitites: flour, water, salt, sugar, yeast.

A lot of the traditional recipes employ a plastic bag as the steaming container which is placed directly into the water; I use ceramic containers (mugs, in this case) and a steamer instead. If you'd like to try this and don't have a pot built for this purpose, you can buy metal steaming inserts that will fit into any pot you have. One of these is pictured in the second recipe I tested. I used to use a pair of chopsticks inside a wok to hold up the dish for steaming.

South African Steamed Bread - part 1
Steamed Bread / Isonka Samanzi - Plain cream mug
Mzantsi Isonka Samanzi (South African Steamed Bread)

This is the bread in the cream coloured mug. I cut the recipe down to a quarter and it fit in a mug with a 600 mL capacity.

This one gave me no problems whatsoever, unlike the other two versions. The dough was very wet and sticky but I was still able to knead it. It took about an hour to rise and cooked as expected.

My loaf came out with a more open crumb than the picture on the recipe page. It was soft and slightly chewy. I made chili for dinner, just so we could eat up all the bread. We dug into this loaf first.

The recipe is here - http://www.mzansistylecuisine.co.za/steam-bread/

South African Steamed Bread, Part 2 can be found here - http://moby.to/9unsq5

South African Steamed Bread, Part 3 can be found here - http://moby.to/rpuej3