Soft White Loaf Bread

My recipe is adopted from pain de mie. The original recipe is in Chinese, I had to get my mom to translate it for me. I modified the method and a little bit of the ingredients to suit my taste.

On the original website, she said to split the dough if it's too much for the pan but she didn't tell how to tell if it's too much...

So after some research, this is the measurement I decided to use: 900g for a 9x5x3in pan or 600g for a 8x4.5x2.5in pan.

So measure your pan before you bake to determine how much dough you'll need.  

One thing I found out when measuring, is that the width you see on the paper, is measured across the top and not the bottom since the bottom is more narrow and the top is wider.

This recipe adds up to slightly lower then 600g so I used a 8x4.5x2.5in pan since it was the closet pan size.

Soft White Loaf Bread

Ingredient

• 300g bread flour
• 4g instant yeast
• 5g salt
• 25g honey
• 15g oil
• 195g milk, i have 1% milk at home so this doesn't add a lot of fat (130g is 2/3 of the milk, measure this out first because you might not need all 195g. Depends on humidity)
• 15g butter
• This adds up to 559g

Directions

1. Mix all the dry ingredients together.
2. Add in honey, oil and 130g of the milk and mix well.
3. Knead the dough and slowly add more milk as required. Even if you're not mixing it by hand, you should be able to see how well the dough is absorbing the milk to judge if you need more. Or you can always stop the machine and feel the dough.
4. Knead until it is smooth and elastic. Best test I found was the window pane test.
5. Knead in the butter
6. Let it rise to about 2 times the size. When you press a finger in, it should spring back slowly. 
7. Flip onto table and deflate. Then fold the left side 1/3 and right side over the folded side. Then do the same thing up and down.
8. Flip around and cup the dough with palms facing you. Pull the bread into you. Do that on all 4 sides so in the end you'll have a round shape.
9. Let it rest for 20-30 mins
10. Press on it to degas, try to keep it in a circle
11. Make a triangle shape by folder the right and left side towards the middle at a slant
12. Start at the pointy end and roll towards you
13. Once you finished rolling, tuck in the ends and put the dough edge side down into the pan.
14. Let it rise to double to triple the size.
15. Use the poke test to see how much longer does it need to rise. When you poke the dough, the indent is suppose to slowly come back and not to the full point. It should actually stay a bit indented. If it rises back right away, then you need to poof longer, if it doesn't rise back at all, it's overpoofed.
16. Bake it at 375 degree F for 35 mins.

Tip: If your house is cold, turn on the oven light and put your bowl in there to let the bread rise. My house is 17-19 degrees C in the winter so I have to do this. It works quite well

The more I did research into bread making, the more scientific I found it. It can be easy if your oven, material etc matches nicely the recipe you find. If something varies, like temperature or material, it can become very complex to troubleshoot and adjust the recipe unless you understand the science behind making bread. 

But I find it very fun. After a several loaves, I think I finally have a good feel for my mixing machine and the proofing process.

So don't get discourage if the first time doesn't pan out for you. 

Categories: Baked Goods, Honey, Milk, White Bread