There's rice in my bread

And it's delicious. (<----the link for the recipe is there.)

This month's daring bakers challenge was to make Dutch Crunch Bread...which is to say, make some bread and add a yeasted, rice-flour based topping to the bread that rises and cooks into a crunchy topping worthy of your tongue's time. In Dutch it's called Tigjerbrood, or "tiger bread" after the tiger-like shell on the bread after baking. It's apparently often used in sandwich rolls, and I do recommend you try making it.

Blog checking lines: Sara and Erica of Baking JDs were our March 2012 Daring Baker hostesses! Sara & Erica challenged us to make Dutch Crunch bread, a delicious sandwich bread with a unique, crunchy topping. Sara and Erica also challenged us to create a one of a kind sandwich with our bread!*

see the rice? awesome.

In the meantime, I noticed that besides the soft white sandwhich roll-type bread recipe offered by the challenge, there was also a recipe that had...cooked brown rice IN the bread. Awesome, says me, I have some cooked brown rice IN my fridge. It's fate.

The bread was divine to knead. Have you ever kneaded bread dough with rice in it? It's luxiourious. All pebbly and soft in your fingers. Do it. Trust me.

So, you mix and knead, and rise and then lop the dough in half and put it into two bread loaf pans. Check, check, and check.

Let the loaf pan penned dough rise again. Check.

this is the topping, already rising in the orange bowl.

Then you mix up the tiger topping. Check.

oh. crap.

Then you put the tiger topping on top of the loaves and let IT rise. 

Oh. 

Crap. 

This is exactly the point at which you think...hmmm...that's not going to work. 

So you re-check the recipe and see that the baking lawyers have 9x5 inch loaf pans and you...don't.

It's cool. I wanted to clean up this frothy science experiment mess.

It's cool. I mean, you're sweating, not only from the heat in the kitchen but from the thought of all that mess and crazy in your oven.

Deep breath.

Put some foil on a cooking sheet and put the sheet below the loaf pans.

It's going to be okay.  Crazy, but totally okay.

Crunch crunch crunch went the tiger...

The bread came out crunchy. A little overflowing with crunch.

 overflowing with crunchy goodness! 

But it was sweet and had a lovely crumb underneath all that crunch.

bread.

It was especially good toasted. With butter.

nubbly rice texture. yum.

* Yeah, I didn't make a sandwich with mine. I didn't even notice that I was supposed to until I read those lines while posting this. The bread is long gone, folks, and there were no sandwiches. Daring Baker Fail.