SESAME CHIVE MILK BREAD
+ the ultimate garlicky buns... If you bake one thing this Jan, let it be this.
Welcome back to another issue of How I Cook+!
Another week has hurtled by here’s another recipe for you to make this weekend.
You can’t beat a perfectly fluffy loaf of Japanese milk bread. I’ve made it a handful of times and have always fancied giving a flavoured dough a whirl, so after many tests there are two versions to make here; a simple loaf and a tear and share garlic bread.
DISCLAIMER: I couldn’t quite get the hang of shooting this bread and during my tests, every time I had finished baking them the sun was gone. So, please excuse the less than ideal photography this week… They still taste great!
Happy baking!
B x
There’s a restaurant just off of London fields called Papi that serves one of the best iterations of bread and butter around. A hulking slice of fluffy milk bread, toasted on a hot grill and served with a scoop savoury, umami-laden marmite butter. Matt (chef & owner) is a clever cook, knowingly transporting his guests back to frantically eating marmite on toasted Hovis white bread at the kitchen table before running to the school bus. That’s a fond memory, and Matt’s serving is a 10X version. A very fun thing to eat.
I scarfed that down about a year ago and have had my own version milk bread on the to-do list ever since. So, I present to you, sesame chive milk bread. Let’s get into it.
Why milk bread?
Well, first of all, what is milk bread? Just bread made with milk? Sort of, but not really…
The milk bread we’re talking about today is called Shokupan. Hailing from the snowy Japanese prefecture, Hokkaido, Shokupan and has a slightly sweet, super light, fluffy texture. It’s tricky to track down exactly where Shokupan (“food bread”) came from, but I found a few leads in my research. Anthropologist Annie Sheng has found evidence to suggest Shokupan was brought to Japan by British baker Robert Clarke in the late 19th Century when he established the Yokohama Bakery. Whilst the origin story is a bit foggy, what’s clearer is Shokupan’s rise in popularity.
Post WWII, Japan experienced rice shortages and received relief shipments of wheat. Time for bread to shove its way into the mainstream diet. Shokupan grew hugely popular throughout Asia during the latter half of the 20th century, hitting the global stage in the 2010s thanks to social media virality. Now it’s everywhere!
Milk bread owes a lot to the tangzhong used to make it (more on that shortly), a roux-like paste of cooked milk and flour. This paste encourages that fluffy interior and keeps the bread fresher for longer. You’ll often see milk bread baked in closed, lidded, square shaped tins (Pullman style loaf tins) giving it the sharp edges and boxy look you might recognise in some classic Western loaves. But what makes it so different from the white bread we grew up eating?
Whilst you might be fooled into thinking a loaf of Shokupan is the same as a loaf of mighty white, you’d be wrong. Milk bread is an enriched dough whereas white bread is a lean dough. Shokupan is packed with added fat (from milk and sometimes butter) giving it that slightly sweeter, richer flavour. This bread is super easy to make at home and is a great place for beginner bakers to start with enriched doughs.
Enriched Doughs
An enriched bread dough is one made with any combination of added fat, sugar and dairy. If you add extra sugar, butter, oil, eggs etc to a dough, bang, it’s officially enriched. In contrast to simpler, lean doughs, baking the enriched variety can be a little intimidating. Brioche can be a sticky customer, doughs can split (just like mayonnaise or chocolate), they can be a nightmare to shape and building a good gluten structure can be a devil. Fear not, this one is actually very, very easy!
When you’re making bread, goal number one is to develop a good, strong gluten structure. You do this by hydrating and agitating the proteins in the flour (their science-y names are glutenins and gliadins) and they combine to form a complex web of gluten. This gives your dough strength, elasticity, chew and most importantly, defines the texture of the crumb (the inside bit of the bread) once baked. You need plenty of gluten to make the kind of bread we’re after today.
Enriched doughs require a very strong gluten network in order to accept and hold onto all of the extra fat and sugar. Both fats and sugars are ‘shorteners’ i.e they shorten the gluten chains within your dough, weakening the structure. A good example of where shortening is used to change texture is Scottish shortbread (the clue’s in the name here folks). Shortbread has a very high fat content (butter) and the dough is worked as little as possible in order to prevent lots of gluten development. This results in a delicate, crumbly, buttery, short texture.
The difference between shortbread and other enriched bakes (like brioche) is that shortbread isn’t leavened (made with yeast or other significant raising agent) so doesn’t require that strong network of gluten. For our milk bread recipe to work, it needs to have sufficient structural strength (gluten) to hold onto the all of the air bubbles the yeast will provide. Think of it as an inflating balloon, if the balloon is very weak, as more and more air is introduced, it’ll just pop. Similarly, without enough structural strength, as the dough proofs and grows, it won’t be able to support itself and will simply collapse.
As soon as you start adding different bits and bobs to a complex, super strong gluten- rich dough, it’ll change straight away. When you make bread, the moment you add any sugar and butter to the dough, you slacken everything out and have to re-work the dough to bring it back. In traditional brioche, you add softened butter post gluten development, but because there’s a tangzhong in play, the dough has an extra head start and can emulsify all the ingredients without relying on a big strong gluten network right off the bat.
Tangzhong
The secret to bouncy, fluffy texture of this bread is something called a tangzhong.
The tangzhong method is a technique from China that was adopted in the production of milk bread. To make a tangzhong you remove a small portion of the total flour and liquid from the dough (typically milk or water or a combination of the two) and cook them in a pot until you have a thick, smooth paste. This pre-gelatinises (pre-cooks) the starches in the flour so when the paste is mixed with the rest of the ingredients to form a bread dough, you can really ramp up the hydration percentage of your dough. The more hydration, the softer and more luxurious the crumb.
The use of tangzhong is common in breads that are shooting for a light, fluffy, cloud-like texture. It’s used to make plenty of Chinese breads, including the super soft Baozi steamed buns you might eat at a Dim Sum restaurant. The Swedes call this process skaldning (shout out Nicola Lamb for the knowledge!) and use it when making traditional Semla buns in the period before Easter.
Smart baking all round!
Adding Flavour
This recipe is perfumed with the gentle, onion-y hum of chives and the sweet nuttiness of toasted sesame seeds. These are added once your dough has established itself as a strong, smooth, stretchy mass. You don’t want to add any ‘bits’ to your dough too early. If you add them before you’ve build that network of gluten, the bits get smashed to pieces, the chives will almost purée as they get mixed through the dough. We want a light fluffy crumb, holding onto those delicate chopped chives.
You also need to let the dough relax for 5 or 6 minutes before adding any bits. If you go in too soon whilst the dough is super tight and tense from that workout you’ve just put it through, the gluten network will resist the chives and seeds and you won’t have a nice even mix. Give it a few minutes to slacken out, chuck the garnish in, and gently mix until it’s incorporated. If you zoom in on the picture of the dough above, you’ll see the seeds and chives just below the surface are shrouded with a super thin layer of dough, it’s almost transparent. This is a great sign and shows the dough has sufficient gluten development.
A bonus way to incorporate flavour into that dough is to dump a big ol’ dose of garlicky, herby butter on top. This is what makes the milk bread into milk garlic bread and it’s utterly delicious.
Egg Wash
Egg wash your dough before it goes into the oven! This isn’t completely essential, but adds a gorgeous gloss to the dough and adds extra moisture to the bake. This will help your buns puff up in the oven by decreasing the risk of case hardening.
Case hardening is when the outside of the dough sets too hard, too soon in the oven, before the interior can fully puff and aerate, inhibiting the rise of the dough. You might have seen bakers chucking a cup of water into a hot oven to add moisture to the cooking environment, this has similar results. Adding moisture to the outside of your bake helps keep the elasticity in the dough for longer, allowing for more puff.
I like to use egg yolks with a splash of milk, but a whole egg beaten with a drop of water is also good! Be thorough, and cover every last corner of those buns.
Baking Bread in Tins
Baking in a tin is a really lovely way to bake if you’re relatively new to the bread game.
The more you bake bread, the more you come to realise that more than half the battle is dough shaping. Even baking a simple loaf of bread in a tin requires a few precise movements, tactical turns and gluten manipulation. In the picture above, I’ve rolled three tight rounds of dough, encouraging the gluten into an even spiral with the seam facing down to encourage a smooth, shiny top and an even rise in the oven. Sure it looks fancy and will turn out a pretty loaf, but is it vital to the baking of a tasty loaf? Not entirely.
The good thing about using a tin is that even if your shaping isn’t tip top, the tin is there to help, it’s your back up plan. Whatever comes out of the tin will be roughly tin shaped, rather than flat as a pancake on a baking tray as so many beginner, free form loaves are, so don’t panic!!
Serving suggestions
The loaf is pretty versatile. You’ll make a ripper grilled cheese with this bread, it toasts beautifully and you can handle a couple of thick slices easily. Freshly baked, it makes the perfect tuna or egg mayo sandwich (egg/tuna salad!) or as my clever colleague Chloe has in the pic above, smash some mortadella, rocket and avocado in there for a pretty perfect lunch.