Easy Milk Bread Loaf
Make some freshly baked and irresistibly fluffy and fragrant milk bread at home without needing to fuss around with tangzhong!
- Prep time
- 30 min
- Cook time
- 35 min
- Yield
- 12 servings
- Difficulty
- HARD
Ingredients
Quantities are shown as originally provided.
- 500 g bread flour (3¾ cup)
- 40 g sugar (3 tbsp )
- 1½ tsps instant yeast
- 225 g cold water (a little bit less than 1 cup )
- 115 g cold milk (½ cup)
- 9 g sea salt (1½ tsp)
- 25 g unsalted butter (1¾ tbsp)
- butter for coating the pan and brushing the bread
- flour for coating the pan
Instructions
- 1
Mix bread flour, sugar, yeast, water and milk in a stand mixer, kneading on low speed until the dough is formed.
- 2
Cover the mixing bowl and let it rest for 30 minutes. Meanwhile, bring the butter out from the fridge, cut it into 4 pieces and leave it on the counter to soften a little.
- 3
Add salt and continue to knead the dough for 1 minute.
- 4
Add butter cubes and knead until the dough passes the windowpane test. (This step takes me about 7 minutes, with 6 minutes on low speed and 1 minute on medium speed. The actual time it takes you depends on your mixer.)
- 5
Form the dough into a ball (it will be a bit sticky) and put it in a lightly greased bowl. Cover and let it rise in a warm place (between 82°F to 90°F) for 1 hour until it almost doubles in size.
- 6
Transfer the dough onto a working surface and cut it (don't pull it apart with your hand) into 3 even pieces. Form each piece into a ball. Cover the dough balls with a damp dish towel or greased plastic wrap, allowing them to rest for 15 minutes.
- 7
Roll the dough out with a rolling pin to an oval shape and then roll it up to a log, do the same for the other two pieces, cover and let it rest for another 15 minutes. (See the pictures in the post)
- 8
For each log, rotate the dough 90 degrees before rolling them out again into long rectangles and rolling each rectangle back up into a cinnamon roll type of shape.
- 9
Grease a 10 x 5 loaf pan and coat with a thin layer of flour. Put the rolled up dough into the pan (see note), cover with greased plastic wrap and let it rise in a warm place until it fills 80-90% of the pan (this takes about 1-1.5 hours).
- 10
Preheat the oven to 375°F in the last 20 minutes of proofing. Move the rack to about ⅓ of the way from the bottom.
- 11
Put it in the oven to bake for 30-35 minutes. Loosely cover with a piece of foil after baking for 15 minutes to prevent the bread color from turning too dark.
- 12
Remove bread from the oven and drop the pan on the counter top (from around two inches up) once to help prevent it from shrinking, then transfer the bread on a cooling rack right away. Brush the top with melted butter and let it cool for 15 minutes before enjoying.