Why a rainbow bread? Why not?

I bake my homemade rainbow bread for my kids, it makes our mornings more joyful and colorful even if we have to get up early. I make it a sandwich bread that fits into the sandwich maker.

You can make the rainbow bread easily at home, you don’t need any special supplies, just regular bread ingredients and some food colorant from the store.

Rainbow Bread – Supplies

My bread pan is rather small so I make 2 loaf from this.

440 g of all-purpose flour
8 g of salt
10 g of sugar
125 g of milk
174 g of water
20 g of active yeast or 7g of dried yeast
3 tbsp of softened unsalted butter
food colorant in gel, at least the following colors: red, yellow, blue, black
rectangle bread pan

Rainbow Bread – how to make it

Heat the milk just a little bit to be lukewarm. Mix in the yeast sugar and stir. Let is work in a warm place for 10-15 minutes, the yeast will activate. Then add flour, salt, water and butter and knead until the dough is smooth. Let it rise.

Divide the dough in 7 equal parts and put the colorant in the middle. If you don’t have the exact colors but you have the basic four, here’s how you mix the other colors of the rainbow:

– orange = red + yellow

– indigo = blue + black

– green = blue + yellow

– purple = blue + red

Knead each piece of dough until the color is distributed evenly. This migh take some time and also dont worry if the dough isn’t colored 100 % evently, some colorants are really tough in this aspect but the color will unify a little while the dough rests and even more when it bakes. Do you see my blue? It just wouldn’t color well. Hoever, look at the baked bread, the colors are beautifully vibrant, everything is colored perfectly.

Take the first color and roll it out or between two sheets of baking paper or on a table that you’ve springled with some flour. In this case you need to sprinkle also the dough itself. You don’t need to roll it out too thin, just a little.