(lively music)
- Hey everyone.
Welcome to Pai's Kitchen.
I am making my very first bread recipe of the show,
but not any kind of bread.
I am making Asian-style fluffy, light as cloud bread.
Now in Asia, they like to call this Hokkaido milk bun,
not because I'm using milk from Hokkaido or anything.
That's just the name that they use.
There is a lot of milk in the recipe,
which is one of the secret to its fluffiness.
Now if you have been intimidated by bread baking,
I get you, I've been there, but trust me.
This recipe is very forgiving.
Give it a go.
I think you're going to have success.
So, let's get started.
So, the very first thing I've got to make
is what's called a milk roux,
or tangzhong in, I believe, Chinese.
This is the secret to the fluffiness
and softness of the bread.
It's super, super easy.
Okay, it's just two ingredient, milk and flour,
so I got here some whole milk.
Wee!
And into this I'm gonna add some flour.
And I'm using bread flour
because we are after all making bread.
Bread flour is high in gluten.
It's gonna allow you to create that chewiness
of the bread.
So I'm gonna give this a whisk
to make sure I get rid of any flour lumps.
Now I'm gonna turn this on.
And once I turn the heat on,
I wanna be stirring all the time.
Once the milk starts heating up,
it starts getting thicker.
That's exactly what you're going for.
Oh, look at that, look at that.
And once it's super thick like this,
basically, once it's not getting any thicker
than where it's at,
turn off the heat.
So you might be thinking, "What the heck is she doing?
"I thought we were making bread.
"Why is she making this goo?"
So, what's happening is
in order to have fluffy and soft bread,
you need a lot of moisture content in the bread.
But if I were to add all of that milk
into my dough straight,
the dough would be so wet
and I couldn't really handle it, right?
But by making a roux,
you've turned the liquid milk
into this thick paste,
and so I am now able to force this much liquid
into the dough,
without making the dough too wet.
Brilliant, right?
And this is a secret for a lot of Asian style bread.
When I found out about it, it's...
It's amazing.
So that's it!
So now my tangzhong is still a little bit warm.
I'm gonna add it to my liquid ingredients here.
So I've got some evaporated milk.
And you can use regular milk.
I just find evaporated milk is like extra milky milk.
(laughs)
It's richer and more delicious,
but, totally, regular whole milk is fine.
No skim milk though.
No skim milk.
And this just helps it cool down,
so you don't have to sit there and wait
for this paste to cool down.
Eggs.
Well, egg.
This is one egg.
Give that a quick stir.
Again, don't worry about the tangzhong being still lumpy.
it will get all kneaded out.
Okay, so I am using my beautiful pink machine here.
You can do this all by hand.
So, in here, I'm going in with bread flour,
and I have done this, half whole wheat, half white flour.
That worked really well as well.
So if you wanna make this a little healthier, you can.
So I like to always use instant yeast,
instead of active dry yeast.
It's just so much easier to work with.
You just add it to your dry ingredients,
and you don't have to worry about blooming it
and all that stuff,
and the results are the same.
So I'm just gonna give this a quick,
just mix with my hand
just to get the yeast all mixed in there a little bit.
All my liquids going in.
So all I'm gonna do right now
is mix the dough just until the dry flour is absorbed.
We're not gonna really knead it knead it.
(machine whirring)
Okay, so that's good enough.
So there's no more dry flour in the mix,
but the dough is still quite rough.
I'm gonna let it rest at this point for 20 minutes.
And this is a process called autolyse.
I think that's how you pronounce it.
And this process allows hydration of the flour
and for gluten development without kneading
and therefore oxidizing the dough.
Because if you knead the dough too much,
it actually negatively affects the flavor
and the texture of the bread.
So this way, you won't end up needing to knead the bread.
That's a lot of kneed!
You won't need to knead the bread for as much time.
So the bread is well-rested.
We're now gonna continue the kneading process.
So I'll make sure I'll lock this first,
and on low.
And now, I'm going to add my seasoning,
my salt and sugar.
And I didn't add the salt and sugar in the beginning,
because it can interfere with the autolysis.
And the sugar, you can actually add more.
I'm only adding a couple tablespoons.
If you want this to be a sweeter bread,
I found that three works really well.
Four will make it distinctly sweet,
so it just depends on what kind of bread you're going for.
So when you first add the sugar and the salt,
it'll kinda spin like crazy.
So I just like to stop it and scrape it off the hook.
and basically you wanna keep kneading.
Keep kneading it until it's smooth, okay.
And I like to, every minute or so,
take it off the hook and just re-adjust
because I find you get a piece that's stuck right here
that's not getting kneaded.
(lively music)
The bread is now relatively smooth.
Mmm.
I love touching dough.
One very important ingredient that we need to add,
and I'm just gonna take this off the hook.
I'm gonna add butter,
and you wanna leave the butter till the end.
Because if you add it in the beginning,
it'll interfere with the gluten development,
and your bread won't have as much extensibility.
As the machine is running,
just a little at a time.
And at first, it doesn't look it wants to be mixed.
See how it's just kinda like spinning around now.
Do not worry.
We will fix that.
Okay.
I'm gonna stop that and then pull
everything off the hook,
and scrape the sides a little bit.
And the reason why I like to make this bread also,
that if you buy this bread,
like Asian style bread from an Asian bakery,
a lot of times they'll use margarine,
and that's not good for you.
It's so bad for you.
It's all sorts of trans fats.
If I make it, I know I'm using real butter.
It taste better, it's better for you.
It will work itself in, I promise.
(machine whirring)
So that mess of butter eventually,
with your patience, absorbs into the bread,
and you've got nice smooth dough.
So now I've got a big bowl for my bread to proof in,
but I wanna make sure I brush it with oil or melted butter
with a mini brush of course.
I always like to finish final kneading by hand
before I let it proof,
because, you know,
I just feel like it's more evenly kneaded
if I do it by hand at the end,
and I just love touching dough.
Like it's just hmm,
so soft.
So now that it's nice and smooth like a baby's bottom,
you just let this rest in that bowl
that we've greased.
And we wanna turn this around
to get it completely coated in oil,
because as this rise, I wanna put plastic wrap over it.
If this top part is not greased,
it'll stick to the cling film.
And now this just needs to rest on room temperature
for one hour or until it doubles in size.
If it's really cold where you are,
it might take a little longer.
If you don't have time, you can also let it do
a slow cold fermentation in the fridge.
That means you cover it, put it in the fridge,
and then just continue with the recipe over night,
so tomorrow, okay?
Woo!
Look at this bread.
So it's been about 15 minutes on my end,
because it's really warm in this place.
I find bread baking just so satisfying.
You see that and you're like, "Oh, that worked."
Okay, so now what you wanna do is take it out
and degas it.
Press all the air out of that.
So at this point, we're at the shaping stage.
And you can shape this to whatever shape you want.
You can do free-form buns,
you can put them in loaf pans,
you can put them, anything.
What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna do pull-apart buns.
So I'll put buns in a round cake pan,
and then when you go to serve it,
people can pull apart.
I just find the pulling apart of buns
one of the most satisfying things ever.
For my eight-inch round cake pan,
I can put eight buns in here,
and then I'll end up with three buns left over
that I will then bake as free-form buns.
Okay, so you'll just have to work
with whatever size pans you've got.
So each bun is going to be about 65 grams.
So I'm gonna just weigh each one.
67!
I'm good at this.
All right.
You wanna form each bun into
a bun.
(laughs)
So I'm gonna just sort of press everything down,
and then gather the edges.
And then by doing this,
what you create is a smooth skin on the other side.
And then what I do is I grab it with my hand,
and I pull it.
And my pinky is sort of dragging the bottom,
and then you get this nice little cute bun.
Look how cute that is!
And that's all you do,
and then you pop it in your cake pans.
Yey, and look at my beautiful flower-shaped buns.
So these will need to proof again.
This time I find it takes slightly less time,
45 minutes should do it.
But again, if it's colder it's gonna take a little longer.
Meanwhile, preheat your oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit,
and I'll see you in a little bit.
Look at my bread,
and it's puffed up.
It's ready to go into the oven.
So I'm going to stick it in,
and then I'm gonna just reduce the temperature to 350,
and that's gonna bake for...
The free-form will bake for about 15,
and the cake pans will bake for about 20 to 25,
and that's it.
And then you'll have soft, fluffy, white bread.
Mmm.
Look at this.
Look how beautiful these are.
I'm gonna flip it out.
It's still pretty hot.
Ahh!
Ta-dah!
Whoop!
I don't like to let it completely cool in the pan,
because I find the bottoms are to get soggy.
Once it's got, like, five minutes
flip it out onto a rack and let it cool completely,
but I wanna show you this.
Look at this texture of this bread.
Oh yeah.
Look at that.
Look how soft and fluffy this texture looks.
I mean you can just tell that's good stuff, right?
Look at that.
Smells so good, so buttery.
It's still warm.
Oh it's like
white bread perfection.
It's so soft, but at the same time chewy and buttery.
Just a hint of sweet.
Two table spoons of sugar
will give you a neutral bread
that'll work in savory,
sort of like as a dinner roll or a sandwich,
or as a sweet bread.
You wanna fill it with something sweet,
so good.
Now, this is actually a really, really good base dough
if you wanna start filling it, wrapping it,
turning it into all sorts of different cool creations.
And yes, I will have something coming up,
so definitely stay tuned.
This is super useful dough.
But seriously, if I just have this,
oh, maybe dip it in some condensed milk
or dip it in my pandan custard.
Ah, perfect.
So the recipe, as always, will be on PaisKitchen.com.
When you make it, send me a photo
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and I will see you next time
for your next delicious adventure.
- [Man] Show me the buns again.
- It's so squishy!