Yeasted Sweet Bread

It all started with the holiday baking project – fermenting flour, sugar, and butter into decadent, fluffy, and buttery panettoni. Yeasted sweet bread suddenly seemed so fascinating, arousing in me a desire to learn more about this mouth-watering arena of bread baking. I’ve learned to appreciate textures that only a yeasted sweet bread can give – soft strands pulling like cotton candy, melting my tastebud away with its buttery sweetness, never cloying, but only just right. A yeasted bread dough makes for a chewy texture, but adding sugar, eggs, and butter endows it a special softness. Yet because the same sugar, eggs, and butter inhibit yeast fermentation, much work is dedicated to kneading and tuning fermentation time to rise the bread into desirable fluffiness.

Picking up from where I left off with the panettone, I looked into tangzhong, a technique employed in Asia to make soft and voluminous milk bread, sometimes compared to being cloud-like. One makes tangzhong by cooking a portion of flour, water, and milk into a thick paste. The proposition is that cooking flour enables the dough to hold more water, thus makes for a moister bread. Several reviews on this technique argue that it’s not the tangzhong, but the additional butter, eggs, and sugar being responsible for softer bread. This technique is, however, not new. It is already employed in other baked goods, such as the pâte à choux, where the dough is cooked to hold extra water in order to help it rise without a leavening agent. Thus I think that it has merits to enable a higher rise in bread. There is a consensus that tangzhong also helps keep bread soft for longer.

A typical milk bread requires a morning, a relatively short amount of time for a yeasted dough. Since the bread has not had enough time to develop depth and flavor, it will taste inferior to a bread dough that has taken sufficient time. This can be offset by adding flavor enhancers to the dough other than butter and milk, such as dry milk powder and honey. Honey also adds moisture, but further inhibits yeast activities, so we need to allow for longer fermentation time, about twice the amount of time it takes without it per observation.

Tangzhong: ¼ cup wheat flour, ¼ cup milk, ¼ cup water, 1 tsp salt
Then add: 1 tbsp honey, ½ cup milk, 1 egg at room temperature
2½ cup wheat flour, ¼ cup sugar, 1 tbsp active dry yeast, 1 tbsp dry milk powder
4 tbsp butter, very softened

Whisk together the flour, sugar, yeast, and milk powder and set aside. Whisk the flour, salt, milk, and water for tangzhong over medium heat until forming a thick roux. Turn off the fire, then add the honey and the cold milk and continue to whisk until homogeneous. Adding the cold milk helps cool down the roux as well as warm the milk. Ensure the mixture is warm and not hot before whisking in the beaten egg so as not to curdle it.

In a stand mixer at dough hook setting between 2-4/10, add the flour mixture, then the tangzhong mixture and knead for 15 minutes. Then add the butter, one tbsp at a time and continue to knead for another 5-10 minutes. Cover, 1^st proof takes ~1-2 hrs until doubled in size. Scrape the dough onto a flat surface and knead with hands for a minute. Divide the dough into 4 portions, flatten each portion into a rectangle and make two folds, like folding a letter. Arrange the folded dough portions into the baking pan across it, or width-wise. The baking pan should be minimum 8.5×4.5-inch in dimension. Cover with a damp towel, 2^nd proof takes 45 min to 1 hr. 40 minutes at 350F in a standard oven or 45 minutes at 325F in a mini convection oven will give a fluffy soft and tall loaf, perfect with a fat pat of butter.

The beauty of yeasted sweet bread is that by adjusting fermentation time and the balance between butter, sugar, eggs, and flour, we can achieve a wide range from everyday table bread to decadent holiday treats. The cinnamon bun is somewhere in between – an everyday treat. The original recipe for the cardamom, sans cinnamon, bun calls for a large quantity of yeast, thus a shorter rising time. I have dialed the yeast down along with an overnight fermentation. The amount of cardamom is on point. The buns are perfectly sweet and unexpectedly light and airy, considering the quantity of butter going into them.

A heaping ¾ cup of milk, 1 tbsp active dry yeast, 1 tbsp sugar
1 egg at room temperature, beaten
3 cups wheat flour, ½ cup sugar, ½ tsp salt, ½ tbsp ground cardamom seeds
4 tbsp butter, very softened
Filling: 6 tbsp butter, very softened, ¼ cup sugar, ¾ tbsp ground cardamom seeds
Topping after baking: 2+ tbsp maple syrup, (⅛ cup sugar + ¾ tsp ground cardamom seeds)

Between the spices and the large quantity of fat and sugar, it’s very easy to retard the yeast, so we want to make sure that it is alive and active before mingling with others. Warm the milk with 1 tbsp of sugar and stir in the yeast, wait until foams and bubbles form.

In a stand mixer at dough hook setting between 2-4/10, first add the flour, ½ cup of sugar, salt, ground cardamom seeds, and the egg, then the milk mixture and knead for 15-20 minutes. When done, it should make a pliable and smooth dough ball. Then add the butter, a cube at a time and knead for another 5-10 minutes. Again, it should form a smooth dough ball when finished. Cover and let the dough ferment overnight. It should double in size.

Next day, mix the butter for filling. It should not be melting, but completely soft. Scrape the dough onto a flat surface and knead it by hand for a minute. Divide the dough in half and roll flat into 2 rectangle sheets. Spread the filling onto one sheet, cover it with the 2^nd sheet of dough. Using a pizza cutter, cut the dough into 16 strips, each about ½–¾ inch wide. Slit the dough strips almost in half lengthwise, twist the two together into a braid, then wrap it around your fingers, tucking its tail from underneath up into the center to make a bun. Place onto prepared baking sheets.

Cover and let the buns rise again to double in size, about an hour. Oven at 425F for 10 min. Once they’re out of the oven, brush with maple syrup, then sprinkle cardamom sugar on top. Eat while still warm or reheat at 300F for 5 min.