It has a crusty exterior, but is soft inside. The rice paste crust also gives the bread a distinctive flavour. The paste dries and cracks during the baking process. The bread is generally made with sesame oil and with a pattern baked into the top made by painting rice paste onto the surface prior to baking. Within the United States, it is popular in the San Francisco Bay Area (as “Dutch crunch”), but it is not well-known elsewhere. Tiger bread (also sold as Dutch crunch in the USA, tijgerbrood or tijgerbol in Netherlands) is the commercial name for a loaf of bread which has a unique mottled crust. Sainsbury’s Giraffe Bread (Image Sainsbury’s) I hadn’t chosen to make tiger bread, it was what the “Baking Gods” chose for me when I randomly opened a page from a pile of bread cookbooks, as part of dashing Dom’s (Belleau Kitchen) Random Recipes challenge. It sliced like a dream and had a subtle sesame flavour, which gives a good tiger bread its growl.

The texture and taste was exactly the same as the tiger bread I buy from my local supermarket bakery, but much better…….with a better crust I thought. What’s in a Name? Tiger Bread, Giraffe Bread or Dutch Crunch – Tiger Bread Recipeįor the well initiated tiger bread fans amongst you, it will be apparent from my photos that my bread was neither stripy (as in tiger bread) or patchwork (as in giraffe bread), it was in fact very pale and mottled, and that is my fault completely, as with the absence of rice flour in the pantry and with it being Sunday (limited shop opening hours), I blithely said “rice flour, shmice flour – corn flour will do”!! However, what this bread lacked in stripes and patches was more than made up in flavour, it WAS indeed JUST like a “proper” loaf of tiger bread and was delicious.

Dutch crunch bread taste like