If you make this recipe, please let me know! I always love to see what my readers are baking. So it is as close to instant gratification as bread can get! The best part is, rise time for milk bread is relatively short. Use an egg wash to give it that beautiful golden brown color.When shaping, make sure your dough is rolled out evenly, otherwise your final loaf will be lumpy.Some tips to make your milk bread look beautiful To fix that, we’re going to 1 ) let the flour and wet ingredients rest for 20 minutes to strengthen the gluten 2) incorporate salt, sugar, and butter by smearing and mixing on the countertop and 3) slap and fold the dough instead of kneading. So in summary: milk bread is hard to make by hand because the dough is so sticky and soft. Minute 2:10 of this video is a good example of slap and fold. Soon you’ll find the dough likes sticking to itself more than it likes sticking to your hands and countertop. Then raise, slap, fold, and repeat again. Then fold over the piece in your hand to the top of the dough on the countertop. You’ll lift up the dough in one hand and then slap it down on the countertop. Resist the temptation to add flour and use the slap and fold technique instead. Because the dough is soft and sticky, it’s hard to knead by pushing and pulling. Last trick is to use the “slap and fold” technique instead of regular kneading.For this step, you need to make sure your butter is very soft (not melted) and cut into small pieces. Using fraisage again, we’ll then incorporate our butter.Minute 2:50 of this video is a good example of fraisage with dough. We’ll repeat this again and again until you don’t feel the sugar and salt grains anymore. Then we’ll gather it back to the center to form a pile. We’ll push the dough, salt, and sugar out in small increments, so it’s smeared thinly over the countertop. To do this, we’ll dump the dough out on the countertop and sprinkle the sugar and salt on top. 20-30 minutes may seem like a while to wait, but I promise it will make your life easier later on.
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Autolysing will magically make your dough easier to handle before we head into kneading. Adding sugar and salt will inhibit this process, so we’ll do that later. This step (called autolysing if you’re feeling technical) is so we can let the liquid soak into the flour, which will strengthen the gluten. We’ll then let it rest for 20-30 minutes. Then, we’re going to add the flour, eggs, tangzhong mixture, and yeast and milk without adding sugar or salt.First, we’re going to proof our yeast and milk together rather than adding the yeast dry to the dough.Tricks to make milk bread without a stand mixer
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It’ll walk you through the basic steps of bread-making and give you tips and tricks to troubleshoot along the way.
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If this is one of your first times making yeasted bread, I suggest you read my Tips and tricks for perfect enriched bread. This will give that delicious, buttery flavor in every bite. Milk bread is also an enriched dough, meaning we’ll be adding eggs, butter, and of course, milk. This is what makes it so incredibly light and soft. You essentially cook flour, milk, and water on the stove to create a thick, pudding-like mixture that you add to your dough. The key to perfectly soft, fluffy milk bread is the tangzhong method. In fact, I’ve made the same milk bread both using a stand mixer and by hand, and found the handmade version to be fluffier, taller, and more delicious! I’ve designed this recipe so you can handle the sticky dough completely by hand. The dough is very soft and sticky, so this bread is usually made in a stand mixer, but I know that not everyone has the luxury of owning one. It turns out that this milk bread is actually quite easy to replicate at home. The texture is unlike anything you find at a regular grocery store in the States. The glossy, golden brown crust breaks open to reveal soft cream-colored layers that you can peel apart like cotton candy. One of my favorite parts about visiting Asia is eating the magically soft and fluffy bread.