Leopard Milk Bread Recipe By French Baker (2024)

FAQs

Why did my milk bread come out dense? ›

Why is my milk bread dense? If your milk bread is dense, mostly likely, the dough is under-kneaded. The dough needs to develop enough gluten to expand and become soft and fluffy. A sure way to ensure that the dough is kneaded enough is using the window pane test.

What is milk bread's main difference from traditional bread? The only liquid used in milk bread is milk. In most yeast bread recipes, the liquid is usually water. There are also no eggs in most yeast breads.

Simply put, you have to control the temperature of the bread. Allowing ample time for your bread dough to rise and the yeast to form will create the holes in the bread that give it a lighter texture. Letting your dough get puffy and grow before it goes into the oven is critical.

The dough was under or over proofed. This is the most common reason for dense bread because it can be hard at first to determine when dough is ready to bake. But both under and over fermenting can cause dense bread.

While underworked dough can simply be fixed by a little more kneading, severely overworked dough cannot be fixed. Instead, the overworked dough will result in a hard loaf that will likely not be eaten. It's important not to overwork your dough and continually check for overworking throughout the kneading process.

Give the bottom of the loaf a couple firm taps with your thumb. The bread will sound hollow when it's done. If you're new to this technique, try doing this every five minutes toward the end of baking and you'll hear how the sound changes.

Milk bread was developed in Japan in the 20th century, using tangzhong, a warm flour-and-water paste traditionally used in China to make buns with a soft, springy texture and tiny air bubbles. Surprisingly, milk bread with an incomparable crumb and buttery taste is a snap to make at home, using supermarket ingredients.

I've seen three major reasons for bread to come out too dense (other than dead yeast). The first is that you need to add more liquid. When you're mixing the dough, if the dough feels tight/tough, add some additional liquid. A wetter dough will result in a more open, soft crumb.

Add Sugar

Adding sugar weakens the gluten structure, absorbs water, and eventually makes the bread lighter and softer. As a result, sugar improves the bread's taste, structure and texture. Yeast also eats up sugar to produce carbon dioxide, which raises the dough and makes bread fluffy.

The fat and lactose in milk help with tenderizing the crumb of the bread making it softer and sweeter. The crust of the bread also gets more caramelization.

Is Japanese milk bread dense? ›

The reason that it is so fluffy and soft is because we are making a stater or a roux that is made up of milk, bread flour and water and we are using bread flour which has more protein than all-purpose flour and it results in a more denser and chewier loaf of bread.