Milk Bread

After a school-induced hiatus, I’m happy to report that I can finally post this blog that I’ve been working on since March. 🙄

Anyway, on to your irregularly scheduled blog posting.

Bread Series Part One

Guys.

Making bread is so satisfying.

Because you get to beat the shit out of dough and call it kneading because you need to form gluten and junk. It’s great. Also,

Jump to Recipe

So my cousin sent me a link to this blog that talks about bread basics and I thought it would be fun to have a little ongoing “bread series” where I make various breads and comment on whether I think they were hard to make or not and also how much I like eating them. 😋

So part one is going to be milk bread because I feel like it’s really easy and maybe a touch less involved than regular white bread and also it’s the bomb. Today we’re going to talk about tangzhong and then compare a recipe with tangzhong vs. without it.

So, what’s a tangzhong? At it’s most basic, a tangzhong is basically a roux. Liquid (usually milk, water, or a mix of the two) is mixed with flour and heated on a low setting until it reaches a paste-like consistency. It’s used to make bread softer and apparently helps keep the bread fresh for a longer period of time (with magic because I have no idea how tempered flour and milk would make a loaf of bread stay fresh…something, something, starch gelatinization water absorption…something). It was created in either China or Japan (my brief google search research came up with some conflicting info) but it was definitely made more popular in the 90’s by a Chinese woman named Yvonne Chen who wrote a book about it because apparently this is something that requires extensive writing and reading to understand.

So I had two recipes that were pretty identical, with the only differences being that one contained a tangzhong and the other did not. Also the recipe with the tangzhong made twice as much bread as the one without. Also something about dry milk in one but I kind of forgot to add that so it’s fine.

Tangzhong Milk Bread

So for the milk bread that required a tangzhong, I prepared it the night before by mixing 200g of water with 40g of bread flour (that’s right guys, we have to weigh everything. With the metric system. Scaaary.) in an unheated pan until there were no lumps. Then I put the pan on low heat and constantly stirred my mixture until it made a weird goopy paste thing. I threw that goop into a bowl, covered it, and tossed the bowl into the fridge until the next morning when I took it out to let it come up to room temp so that I could use it to make breads. Honestly I don’t really see the point of point of refrigerating it because when I used this same recipe to make cinnamon rolls I made the tangzhong immediately before making the dough and they result was literally the same so 🤷🏻‍♀️

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So with our (and by our I mean Aly and my because Alyson came over to help bake bread) roux ready and visions of bread dancing in our heads, Aly and I started by dumping all of our dry ingredients (flour, salt, yeast, sugar…all pre-weighed) into a bowl and giving them a little mix. Then we added our wet ingredients (milk, tangzhong, egg, butter) and kneaded the crap out of it for 20 minutes until we had a tacky little ball of dough. We covered it up and let it rest for 40 minutes. We wanted it to double in size (more like 2.5x but whatever) and not spring back when depressed.

We simultaneously made our non-tangzhong bread by mixing the exact same ingredients minus the tangzhong and slightly different amounts for the same amount of time and also let it rest until it was doubled-ish in size.

Once the doughs had proofed, we divided them into equal-sized balls and let them proof again for 15 minutes before rolling them out into small rectangles. We folded the rectangles into thirds, then rolled them up.

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Then we stuffed them into a bred pan and proofed them AGAIN for 30 minutes before slathering them with egg wash (tangzhong) or milk (non tangzhong) and throwing them in the oven for 25 minutes at 355F. We totally forced too many rolls into the bread pans though and they had to bake for an extra 30 minutes 😬

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They turned out fine though.

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And they tasted delicious. 🤤

SO. Which one was better? Honestly I liked the bread without tangzhong better. It was a little easier to make and made less bread so I felt less guilty about eating half a loaf of bread in one sitting. I will say that the bread with the tangzhong did have great staying power though (I recommend brushing with milk instead of egg water though). I think Aly and I ate about half of it and I saved the rest of it for French toast a few days later and the bread was still soft and delicious (and made fantastic French Toast). Basically if you want a relatively quick bread or maybe some rolls for a dinner (with a compound butter, perhaps? 😋), I would go with the one without tangzhong. For bread that lasts (or cinnamon rolls) that you can make bomb French toast with, go for the tangzhong bread.

But ya’ll do you. As long as you go forth and make bread.