Outback Steakhouse
Outback Steakhouse Bloomin' Onion Sauce Copycat Recipe
A horseradish mayonnaise with a real kick, plus the onion technique it was designed for. Five minutes for the sauce.
How to Make Outback Honey Wheat Bread at Home
The Dark Loaf: Coloured With Cocoa, Not Rye
The near-black loaf people ask about, and the ingredient that actually makes it that colour.
AI-generated illustration created for food.fast. It is not photographic evidence of a prepared batch.
People assume this loaf is dark because it is a rye bread or a pumpernickel. It is neither. It is a soft wheat loaf coloured with cocoa powder and molasses, and once you know that, it stops being mysterious and starts being easy.
A tablespoon of cocoa in a loaf this size contributes almost no chocolate flavour - it is well below the threshold where you would identify it - and a great deal of colour. The molasses adds to that and brings a faint bitterness that balances the honey.
The rest is an enriched wheat dough, shaped into small loaves, rolled in oats and baked. It is the smell that fills a house, and it is one of the cheapest things on this site.
How this page shows its working
The method gives quantities, timings and observable cues rather than asking you to guess. The 5 cases in If it goes wrong explain likely causes and corrective action.
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The colouring ingredients, and how far you can push them
Three things darken this loaf and each has a limit:
Cocoa powder, 1 tablespoon. This is the main one. At 2 tablespoons you start to taste chocolate and the bread goes strange; at 1 it is pure colour.
Molasses or black treacle, 2 tablespoons. Colour, plus a bitter edge that keeps the honey from making the loaf cloying. More than 3 tablespoons and the bitterness dominates.
Instant coffee, half a teaspoon, dissolved in the water. Optional and it deepens the colour by a noticeable amount without tasting of coffee. It is a standard trick in dark bread and dark cake.
The restaurant's loaf is darker than this recipe produces, and it is widely assumed to contain caramel colouring - which is a food colouring, not a flavour, and is not something we would add at home. This version gets close on colour using ingredients that also contribute something.
How to make it, step by step
Make it
-
Dissolve the honey, treacle and coffee in the warm water
Whisk until it is a uniform dark liquid. Treacle added to the flour directly sticks in lumps and never disperses.
About 3 min -
Mix, rest, then knead with the butter and salt
Both flours, the cocoa, the yeast and the dark liquid to a shaggy mass. Ten minutes' rest, then the butter and salt, kneaded ten minutes until smooth. Wholemeal flour absorbs more water, so this will feel firmer than a white dough.
About 23 min -
Rise ninety minutes until doubled
Covered bowl, somewhere warm - an airing cupboard or an oven with only the light on. It should roughly double and feel airy when pressed. A wholemeal dough rises a little more slowly than a white one, so give it the full time.
About 1 hr 30 min -
Shape into four small oval loaves and roll in oats
Divide, shape each into a tight oval about 15 cm long, brush lightly with water and roll the top and sides in oats.
About 8 min -
Prove for forty-five minutes, then slash
On a lined tray, well spaced. Then two or three diagonal slashes about 5 mm deep with a very sharp blade.
About 47 min -
190 °C / 170 °C fan / gas 5 for 25 minutes
They are already dark so colour is not a guide. Tap the underside - it should sound hollow - or probe for 93 °C at the centre.
TipThis is the loaf where a thermometer earns its place. You cannot judge a near-black bread by eye.About 25 min -
Brush with melted butter the moment they come out
It gives gloss and keeps the crust soft, which is what this loaf should be.
About 2 min
Serving it the way the restaurant does
Warm, on a wooden board, with whipped butter - which is butter beaten hard with electric beaters for three minutes until it has nearly doubled in volume and turned pale and airy.
Whipped butter spreads on soft warm bread without tearing it, which cold butter does not, and it is one of those trivial restaurant details that is genuinely better.
A pinch of flaky salt beaten through it is an improvement the restaurant does not make.
The loaves are small on purpose - one between two people, pulled apart rather than sliced, is the intended serving and is much better than slices from a large loaf.
Ways to change it once you have made it once
As one large loaf
In a 900 g tin, proved for an hour, baked at 190 °C for 35 to 40 minutes. Same internal temperature.
With seeds
50 g of mixed seeds kneaded in at the end, and roll in seeds rather than oats.
Sweeter
Raise the honey to 90 g. Closer to an American-style sweet brown bread and very good with cheese.
What went wrong, and how to fix it
Each entry names a likely cause as well as a correction, so the advice remains useful when equipment, ingredients or batch size differ.
It is brown rather than near-black
- Why it happened
- The cocoa or treacle was reduced.
- What to do
- A full tablespoon of cocoa and two of treacle, plus the half teaspoon of coffee.
It tastes of chocolate
- Why it happened
- Too much cocoa.
- What to do
- One tablespoon is the ceiling for this quantity of flour.
Dense
- Why it happened
- Wholemeal flour absorbs more water than white - the dough may have been too dry.
- What to do
- Add water a tablespoon at a time during kneading until it is soft but not sticky.
The oats fell off
- Why it happened
- The loaf was dry when it was rolled.
- What to do
- Brush with water first.
I cannot tell if it is baked
- Why it happened
- It is a very dark loaf and colour tells you nothing.
- What to do
- 93 °C at the centre, or a hollow sound when you tap the base.
Questions people actually ask about this recipe
What makes Outback bread so dark?
Cocoa powder and molasses, with instant coffee as an optional extra. It is not a rye bread.
Does it taste of chocolate?
No. One tablespoon of cocoa in 450 g of flour is well below the threshold where you could identify it.
How do I know when it is baked?
93 °C at the centre, or a hollow sound from the base. Colour tells you nothing on a loaf this dark.
Can I make one big loaf instead?
Yes - a 900 g tin, 35 to 40 minutes at 190 °C, to the same internal temperature.
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