If you’re looking for an easy bread recipe, look no further. Today I’m sharing my recipe for milk bread – it’s perfect for all of your bread needs, especially toasted with some salted butter.
If you have been here a while, you may have noticed that the bread recipes I’m sharing at the moment have gone back to basics. I have decided to take the recipes back to basic, especially seeing as we are currently in the midst of a lockdown and more people are baking at home. You will not need many ingredients, this loaf is as simple as my white bread recipe.
Will you be trying to make bread at home while you have the time?
You’ll notice that this recipe is using dried yeast and that is because I didn’t have any fresh, when it comes to converting from fresh to dried yeast, you simple use half the amount. Example 20g of fresh yeast would be 10g of dried yeast.
Anyway, let’s get started, shall we?
Ingredients:
500g Strong bread flour.
8g Salt.
10g Dried yeast.
20g White shortening/butter.
40g Milk powder.
290g Water, warm.
Methods:
Before you get started on the recipe, you’re best to do some prep work. Strat by weighing up all of your ingredients, lining a loaf tin with a strip of parchment paper, lightly oiling a large mixing bowl with some flavourless oil and getting any equipment you may need, such as stand mixer.
Into a large mixing bowl, place the bread flour and the salt, then give the two a good whisk together until they are fully incorporated.
You can then go ahead and add in the yeast, shortening, milk powder and water. Start the mixer on a low speed to start (for approx. 2 minutes), then crank the speed up to a medium speed (mix for approx. 4 minutes) – after the roughly 6 minutes mixing time, the dough should be a clear dough (it’s left no traces in the bowl) and easy to work with.
Flour your work surface with some bread flour and give it a good knead until its smooth and elastic.
Once it’s smooth an elastic, place the dough into a lightly oiled bowl and cover with clingfilm. Leave it somewhere warm for about 60 minutes or until its doubled in size.
After the dough has had its first proof, you can go ahead and knock it back. This is simply the process of removing the gasses that have built up in the dough during the first proof (and it shows the yeast was working).
Once it has been knocked back, bring it into a ball shape and then weigh your dough and divide equally by 3. Take those balls of dough and round them off and cover with cling film and allow to rest for 5 minutes.
Take one of the dough balls and roll it out into a sausage shape, it should be about 20 inches in length. Repeat this for the remaining dough balls.
Now you have all of your dough sausages, you’ll want to do a 3 strand plait. This is probably the easiest one to do, if you don’t know how to do a plait, just watch my youtube video for how to do it.
Grab the plait and place it into your line loaf tin, ensuring the ends of the plait are underneath. Cover loosely with clingfilm and allow to proof for a further 40-60 minutes or until it has doubled in size.
When there is about 10 minutes left to the proofing process, preheat your oven to 200˚c/390˚f.
After the second proof, remove the clingfilm from on top of the dough and egg wash the top of the dough, then place into a preheated oven and bake for 25-30 minutes. At which point it should be well coloured and smell great.
Once the baking is done, remove from the oven and remove from the tin straight away, otherwise it may make the bread soggy. Allow to cool completely and then you can slice it as thickly or thinly as you’d like. I enjoy mine toasted with salted butter – how about you?
That’s all for today guys, I hope you enjoyed. If you did, don’t forget to share this recipe with your family and friends and enjoy it. I’ll be back soon with another blog post and YouTube video, so join me then. In the meanwhile, don’t forget to check out my other social’s – Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok, Twitter and YouTube. The YouTube tutorial will be linked down below.
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