Hokkaido Milk Bread

If you’re like me and like to look at bread photos for inspiration, you usually have a back log of breads that you drool over and want to try but for some reason or another haven’t yet had a chance to make. Either because you kind of forget about it when it’s time to bake or because the recipe looks more complicated than the energy that you have for the project.

This milk bread is one of those for me. It uses a Japanese method called tangzhong to make the final product extra fluffy because the result of the tangzhong is that you can make a bread which is more moist and therefore extra spongy.

This bread sounds mythical and exotic, doesn’t it? Hokkaido is Japan’s second largest island and its capital is Sapporo, maker of the famous Japanese beer and host to the Olympics of 1972. The Japanese milk bread became quite popular in the 19th century when the government encouraged citizens to use and drink local milk to support the farmers. Creative bakers seized the opportunity and created this now famous bread from Hokkaido that is known for it’s supple texture and fluffy characteristics.

The thing about this particular loaf of bread is how easy and versatile it really is to make. The tangzhong takes about 3 minutes to make and the bread can be made in to a loaf like I made it or you could make it in to rolls and maybe even other exotic shapes. The thing is that it’s really fun to work with and is a super fluffy bread.

The recipe

Hokkaido Milk Bread

This Japanese milk bread is soft, fluffy, and delicious!

Tangzhong

3/4 Cup Milk
1/4 Cup Flour

Dough

500 Grams King Arthur AP Flour
3 Tbsp Sugar
1 Tbsp Salt
15 Grams Milk Powder
1 Tbsp yeast
1/2 Stick Butter
2 Whole Eggs
1/2 Cup Milk

Egg Wash

1 Whole Egg

Making the Tangzhong

This step is fairly simple but after you’re done, it’ll need about 15 minutes to cool so now would be a good time to warm up about 1/2 cup of milk and your yeast to let it wake and bloom.

In a pan over medium heat, add milk and flour. Combine until the mixture thickens and becomes gelatinous. Remove from heat and let cool.

The mixture should resemble a roux and should only take a minute or so to get done.

Making the Milk Bread Dough

In a stand mixer, cream the butter and sugar.

Add the dry ingredients, then the tangzhong, then the eggs. Mix at low speed until combined and start adding the milk a little at a time until it’s all incorporated.

As the dough begins to come together, slowly add the milk a little bit at a time and increase the speed of your mixer to the second speed. The dough should be fairly sticky but should clean the sides of the bowl as it’s being mixed.

I mixed mine for about 15 minutes before it was ready so don’t despair if it looks too wet!

Form the dough in to a ball and cover the bowl of the mixer with plastic to keep the dough moist and prevent a dry skin from developing on the dough.

Let it rest for about an hour or so until it doubles in size.

Once doubled, dump it out on to a floured surface and divide the dough in to 4 pieces.

Roll each piece in to a ball and put in a greased baking pan. Cover lightly with plastic for another hour or so until the balls have risen nicely, roughly doubled again.

The Hokkaido bread dough balls before and after rising

Preheat your oven to 450˚F about halfway through.

Beat the eggs and wash over the dough before putting the loaf in the top rack of the oven to bake.

About 15 minutes in, turn the loaf and move to the lower rack.

At this time, lower the temperature to 400˚F.

20 minutes later, remove from the oven and let cool before enjoying!

hokkaido milk bread out of the oven fresh

For your reference, all of the equipment used for making this loaf are listed below. I

23.10.18 By nick Leave a Comment

Bread with Yeasted Water

There are many ways to make bread. From slow sourdough breads that can take a few days from the time you mix to the time you bake to biscuits that can be mixed and cooked within a few moments, the variety of leavening agents available for the home baker are quite diverse.

By far the most popular method that folks use to bake bread at home is with store bought yeast. Just cut open the little bag and add to your mixing bowl and the dough will “double in size” in fairly short order. From there the baker shapes the dough, lets it rest for a little longer, and off it goes in to the oven for a tasty bread in half an hour.

One of the lesser known ways of making bread is by using yeasted water. Yeasted water is the result of adding something that has a little bit of fruit to a jar, and topping it off with water before sealing the jar and waiting for a few days. I first read about this baking method from this post a few years ago. Being the curious cat that I am, I researched a bit and found very little online at the time but decided to take the post’s words as truth and baked one of my first breads with “leavened water” that I made from plums. You can read the post and get a glimpse of the process but I’ll detail it here again for you. One thing that I think I omitted to say on the original post is that you should make your jar as full of water as possible in order to leave as much air as possible out of the jar. The air could cause your infusion to grow mold. This happened to me once and am sure is fairly common given that you want to generally keep these infusions in a warm area for a while.

So since fall is here it means that our local fruit farm had an abundance of prune plums, which are by far my favorite type of plum, so we bought an unnecessarily large amount. We sure had our fill for the season! I also made some plum jam and decided to make this infused yeasted water bread again with the last few plums of the year. You certainly don’t need to use plums for this, so look around your kitchen and get creative! You can use just about any fruit you want to use. Apples and raisins are other good fruits to use but use your imagination and give it a go.

The first step is to wash you jar and your plum really well. From there all you have to do is put the plums in the jar and fill the jar to the top with water before tightening the lid. Now place your creation somewhere it can be left alone for a few days, but nowhere you could forget about because if you do, the gas that gets built up in the jar could cause the jar to explode and thus remind you of where you had left it!

Check in on your infusion once a day so you can observe how things change but the you’ll know the mixture is ready when there are bubbles at the top of the jar.

If you are not ready to bake when the infusion is ready, you can put it in the fridge for a few days but note that this will increase the amount of time it takes for the bread to proof and may require a little bit of “spiking” with regular yeast. I put my infusion in the fridge for a couple of days this time and didn’t notice much of a slowdown but your mileage may vary.

When you do decide to bake, substitute the water in your formula for your infused yeast water and don’t add any yeast. Mix it all together and watch the magic happen. If after a few hours you don’t see any growth in your dough or it’s really slow, don’t hesitate to add a little bit of yeast to your dough and knead it again for a bit to incorporate everything. There’s no shame in that, you’ll still get the subtle aroma of the fruit and your results will be great!

Yeasted Plum Water Bread Recipe

500 grams King Arthur All-Purpose flour
335 ml yeasted plum water
22 grams salt
22 grams sugar

In a medium bowl add your flour, salt, and sugar then add the water. Mix to combine and cover. Using more or less a sourdough method, check in on the dough after half and hour and do a stretch and fold. Do a stretch and fold every half hour or so if your dough is slow to rise. If it’s rising quickly just one of two folds until it can pass the windowpane test easily will suffice.

Once it’s grown and nearly doubled, turn on to a floured surface and pre-shape your loaf to your desired final shape. Put in to a proofing basket and proof for an hour or so at room temperature or in the fridge overnight.

Pre-heat your oven to 500˚F and once ready, score your loaf and load it in the oven before turning the oven down to 450˚F. If you’re using a cloche like I did, bake it with the lid on for 15 minutes and finish baking without the lid, another 15 minutes or so.

Remove the loaf from the oven and let cool before enjoying.

Check out the full video of the process below. If you have any questions leave a comment on YouTube and make sure to subscribe to the channel!

All of the gear that I used to make the bread is listed below:

20.09.18 By nick Leave a Comment

Everyday Sourdough Bread

Easy Sourdough for Every Day

Sometimes in life, a good breakfast comes in handy. And by sometimes, I mean every single day. Breakfast is one of those means that I just can’t live without and make sure that my family has a good meal before they go about their busy days.

Our morning routine includes rousing the kids from their slumber, making sure they get dressed, and providing a health breakfast for them as they go about their day at school and beyond. For us, that means making them something every day. Either in the form of eggs and toast, oatmeal, or fresh fruit and milk, we make sure they have something we know is good for them before they head out the door.

… It’s not always easy, but we try!

Enter the Sourdough

Making bread at home is a lifesaver in the breakfast department. Homemade bread is so much more nutritious than most of the store bought stuff. It’s so much more flavorful too. Whenever we run out of homemade bread the kids ask if I can make some real quick. While I can’t just wiggle my nose and pull out a fresh loaf from the oven, I can plan ahead and have something made for next time.

Note that all the equipment that I’ve used for this bread is listed at the bottom of this post!

That’s probably one of my favorite things about baking bread. People often think that it’s difficult or that you have to be super precise but the truth is, baking bread is really a forgiving process and once you figure out all of the puzzle pieces, you can rearrange your baking cycle and come up with a schedule that really works well in your favor.

This bread was no exception.

I started it on a Tuesday after the kids got on the bus. I just mixed the ingredients and took the dog for a walk.

mixing
ready for autolyse

When making bread at home, one of the most impactful things you can do is let it rest. “Autolyse” comes from the word “autolysis” which means “self digest”. In other words, the dough starts to eat the nutrients in the ingredients and gluten starts to form and flavor starts to develop. This autolyse period is often forgotten or skipped with great detriment to the overall result of your loaf in terms of crust, crumb, and flavor.

I let this dough autolyse for about half an hour before adding the salt and the diastatic malt powder, then I mixed it in the KitchenAid for about 10 minutes on first speed (the one past “mix”).

A brief word on diastatic malt powder. I use it exclusively for sourdough breads. The diastatic malt powder acts as a “slow burn” type of fuel for the bread. It provides the bacteria in the bread the food that it needs to keep the bread going in the right direction over the period of a few days. I don’t use much, usually just .5% (in this case it amounted to only 3 grams) but it’s enough to make a difference.

After mixing the dough I let it rest at room temperature while I left for work. I normally come home around lunch time to take the dog for a walk so at lunchtime I put the dough in the fridge until I was ready to continue.

covered and ready to chill

When I got home from work took it out of the fridge and let it acclimate to room temperature for about 2 or 3 hours. Then I did a few rounds of stretch and folds spread about 45 minutes apart.

After the third stretch and fold I shaped it and put it in a floured proofing basket, covered it in plastic and put it in the fridge.

The next evening I finally was ready to bake, so I remove it from the fridge and preheated the oven to 450˚F for about 45 minutes.

everyday sourdough brad scored for baking

I carefully slid the bread on to the covered Emile Henry cloche and baked it with the lid for 28 minutes (let me real, it was half an hour!) and without the lid for another 15.

Once it was baked I removed it and put it on a cooling tray for about half an hour before tasting it. It was worth the wait and made for a delicious breakfast this morning!

Everyday Sourdough Bread Recipe

Starter build
100g whole wheat
100ml water

Dough
150g whole wheat
300g AP flour
275ml water
14g salt
3g diastatic malt powder

Take all of the ingredients minus the salt and malt powder and combine.
Cover and let autolyse for 45 minutes.
Knead in the mixer or by hand until well developed. This was about 10 minutes in the mixer at first speed (the one past the ‘mix’ speed).
Cover and begin bulk fermentation.
- Do 3 stretch and folds at 45 minute intervals.
Cover and put in the fridge overnight or bulk ferment at room temperature for another 2-3 hours.
Place on to a slightly floured surface and pre-shape.
- Cover with a clean towel and bench rest for half hour.
Shape and place in a proofing basket for 2-3 hours or overnight in the fridge.
Remove from the fridge and pre-heat the oven at 450˚F for 45 minutes with your baking vessel in place.
Flip bread on to parchment paper, score, and carefully load in the oven.
Bake with the lid on for half an hour and with the lid off for another 15 minutes.

Items used in this Everyday Sourdough bread

6.09.18 By nick Leave a Comment

My First Attempt at Einkorn

Baking with Ancient Grains

If you’re like me and love to read about bread and home baking, you probably read other blogs (c’mon, it’s ok to admit it!) and look at those amazing pictures on Instagram too. After seeing a wave of bakers try their hand at Einkorn, I just had to see for myself what all the fuss was all about.

So, naturally, my first instinct was to research what the heck Einkorn was. After a cursory search I read that it is an ancient grain and after looking at some instagram posts I saw that it can be fairly hard to work with because gluten development doesn’t really happen in the way that it does with “modern” breads using bread or other commonly found off-the-shelf type flours for baking like whole wheat and all-purpose.

Digging a little further, I found an article on the website of the Plant Science archives of the Penn State University department of Agriculture. That post told me that it’s a very ancient wheat, approximately 10,000 years old and is an ancestor to our modern wheat. It is indeed an “ancient” wheat! The article even mentions that it contains less toxins and could be better for folks with gluten sensitivities. It also contained a lot of scientific data that I won’t pretend to really understand so I’ll leave that to you to go over there and check it out.

So, after reading about it and seeing delicious loaves of bread resulting from its use, I just had to try some! So I ordered a bag of Einkorn online and a few days later it arrived. In whole wheat form, which I knew was the case but knew that it added a layer of complexity to the project.

… so I put off making this bread for a few months. 🙂

Milling Einkorn at Home

If you have never milled any wheat at home, you’ll quickly realize two things:

Milling is hard!
and
Milling is messy!

However, it’s very satisfying knowing that you can mill fresh wheat at home with simple tools. It’s actually a very easy process if you think about it. Break down the wheat in to usable flour and discard the rest. Some folks use dedicated wheat mills for to make fresh flour at home, but I have used my old Capresso coffee grinder before and did it again for this bread with good results. The thing to keep in mind is that wheat is VERY hard so you need something with some “oomph” to get the job done. A standard blade grinder is not a great idea nor is a weak grinder with plastic parts because the wheat could break your machine. Since we upgraded our coffee grinder a few years ago I have used the Capresso several times with pretty good results.

The first step is to put the whole grain in the hopper and set the grinder to it’s most coarse setting. Run the grains through and you’ll end up with something that is not too dissimilar from oat meal. It’ll look flaky and not at all like flour. And that’s ok, it’s supposed to look like that at this point.

Milling Einkorn at Home

After you go through this first step, put it all back in the hopper and run it through at a medium/coarse setting. I’d say that if your coarse setting is 10 and your finest setting is 0, run it through a second time at a 7. Repeat again at a 4 and then again at a 0.

Once you’ve milled it all the way through, put flour a little bit at a time in a fine mesh sieve and sift the flour on to a big bowl. This will take a while and be dusty so be prepared to commit some time to this task. Your end result will be one bowl of fresh flour and one bowl of the discarded chaff.

the chaff — Einkorn wheat after it’s been sifted

einkorn flour — Einkorn wheat after it’s been sifted, this is the finished product

Baking with Einkorn

Being aware that Einkorn doesn’t have/produce much gluten gives us a heads up that in this recipe, I may have used too much water so adjust your bakes accordingly! Next time I make this bread I will either increase the quantity of whole wheat or decrease the hydration by 5% to see the difference. The dough was a little slack and challenging to shape, but I’m happy with the result. The bread itself was very tasty with a soft chew, so even if you struggle like I did you will end up with a very good tasting einkorn bread at the end.

I didn’t bake a purely 100% Einkorn bread – in fact, I merely dipped my toes in the Einkorn waters and made a roughly 25% Einkorn loaf, with the other parts being 50% AP Flour and 25% Whole Wheat. Here’s the formula I used:

800ml Water
500g AP Flour
250g Einkorn Flour
250g Whole Wheat Flour
23g Salt
10g Yeast

Einkorn Bread Dough

Mix all the flours together and add all of the water
With your hands or a wooden spoon, mix the flour and water to get everything wet. You’ll have a shaggy mass at this point but keep working it for just a minute.
Let it autolyse (a fancy way of saying leave it alone) for at least 45 minutes.
Add the salt and yeast and knead for 5 to 10 minutes.
In half hour increments, stretch and fold the dough on to itself to help develop strength in your gluten and to aerate the dough.
After about 4 or 5 half hour periods, move the dough to a floured work surface, split the dough in 2, and shape to your final shape.
Place the dough on to proofing baskets and pre-heat your oven to 500˚F.
After the oven is preheated, move the dough in to the oven and bake for approximately 45 minutes.

Note that I baked my loaves in two different vessels, one an Emile Henry ceramic dome and the other a cast iron pan. Vessels with lids help to create an “oven inside your oven” and stabilizes the temperature at the bread level. It also helps to trap steam in the chamber so that your crusts develop richer colors and an overall crunchier and artisan texture.

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30.03.17 By nick Leave a Comment

How to revive a dead sourdough starter

Having been working with sourdough starters for a while, I’ve seen and done a lot to my creations. However, when I first started using sourdough I was shocked by what seemed to be quickly dying sourdough. I would make the starter, bake with it on a regular basis, and be happy. But if I went away for vacation and forgot about the starter for a few weeks, I’d be disappointed to find a dark mass with icky liquid on top.

At that stage I figured the sourdough starter was bad. I mean, it smelled fairly strongly (not in a good way) and looked pretty beat up. So I would eventually end up throwing it away and starting over from scratch. Truth be told, that kind of sidelined be from using sourdough for a few years since I kept making perfectly good starters and they ended up dying. I figured I just didn’t have the baker’s equivalent of a green thumb, whatever that may be.

all this time, I was doing it wrong!