If you’re the type of person who exploration of bread is trying to decide if Wonder Bread is really worth more than the store brand of chemicals shaped like a loaf, then you are not only destroying your health, you are denying your taste buds the joy of experiencing life as its meant to be lived. There are so many different kinds of breads you will never try them all. Just last night I was bartending at Four Seasons and the Chef made a blue corn bread that had just the right balance of honey sweetness and creamy butter that I have to find out his secret recipe. But that’s an aside, we are here to talk about milk bread, or as it is sometimes called, Japanese Milk Bread. The texture of this bread is soft and airy while each slice has a rich dairy flavor. There are multiple ways this bread is traditionally shaped but we will only present the loaf pan version.
What makes this bread interesting is that it uses a roux as it’s base. The Japanese call this the Tangzhong and it forms the base for both taste and texture. Another note is that this is one of the view breads that is better with All Purpose flour rather than bread flour.
Ingredients
Tangzhong (roux)
- 20 g Flour, ~2 TBL + 1 tsp
- 75 g Water, ~1/3 cup
Dough
- 350 g All Purpose Flour, ~2.75 cups
- 120 g Whole milk, 4oz or 1/2 cup
- 60 g Sweetened condensed milk – optional
- 60 g Butter – softened
- 12 g Sugar, ~1 tsp
- 5 g Dry yeast, 1.5 tsp or 15.25g cake yeast (Levure)
- 5 g Kosher salt, ~1.5 tsp
- 1 egg
- Neutral oil to grease proofing bowl
Process
- Mise en Place – measure and prepare ingredients prior to starting.
- Make the Tangzhong: in a preheated saucepan on med/low add flour and water and stir constantly. It will quickly form a paste. Continual stirring to work out lumps. Once the paste forms, turn off heat and transfer to bowl to cool.
- Warm milk to ~110 deg F.
- Add sugar and yeast and let it bloom, ~10mins.
- Put flour and salt in a bowl or stand mixer. Add remaining ingredients and mix (speed 1 on stand mixer) until all ingredients are combined.
- If using a stand mixer, increase speed to 4 and knead 4 mins. If had mixing, knead dough on counter gluten becomes elastic. If dough is tacky, lightly flour, want it to remain moist.
- Place dough into greased bowl, cover with film and let rise ~1 hour until dough doubles in size.
- Punch down to remove air and roll dough out on floured surface. Fold by pulling 1/3rd from direction and folding from the other direction to cover, like folding a piece of paper to put in an envelope for folks who remember how to send letters.
- Place dough in loaf pan and let rise 2 hours.
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees (320 fan)
- Bake ~30 mins in conventional oven, 22 mins Fan.
- Remove bread from oven and let rest in pan ~4 mins. It should then slide out easily.
- Place loaf on cooling rack and allow to firm up before slicing. If you slice while hot the bread will quickly dry out.
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