Enriched & Sweetened Breads

While industrially made bread products are labelled as ‘enriched’, this simply means that the factory that produces them adds certain nutrients to them. When I use the term ‘enriched’, I mean that these breads have a small amount of fat and/or sugar added to them, which gives them a tender texture and a delicate crumb. These two types of ‘enriched’ breads could not be more different. The enriched breads in this chapter probably came about when a creative baker experimented with adding butter or oil and/or sugar to already existing bread dough. So many are concentrated in the German-speaking part of Europe and the area immediately east of it that it’s easy to assume that they originated in one of those areas.