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| Pillowy soft green tea milk bun with sweet mung beans |
This is my first proper bread post. I don't think I've baked bread before and a rookie baker like me obviously have not heard of the tang zhong / water roux method in bread-making.
This method involves a starter dough whereby you've to stir bread flour and water and simmer under low heat to make the starter dough. This starter dough is then added to the wet ingredients of the bread recipe.
All bread recipes should be made according to the tang zhong method because it retains moisture in the dough and keeps the bread pillow-soft and fluffy for a long time. Since this method is commonly used in Hokkaido Milk Bread recipe, I'm calling this Green Tea Milk Bun.
Ingredients
Bread Starter/ Tang Zhong:-
15 g bread flour
60ml water
250g all-purpose flour
3g tbsp sugar
1 tsp salt
2 tbsp powdered milk
2 tsp instant dried yeast
50g butter (cut into small pieces, softened at room temperature) 120ml milk
2 tbsp whipping cream
90g tangzhong
Method
Place the bread starter ingredients in a saucepan and cook over low heat. Stir the mixture and smooth out any lumps.
In a large mixing bowl, place the flour, sugar, salt, powdered milk and yeast and mix well. Ensure that salt does not touch yeast.
Mix in the butter, milk, whipping cream and tang zhong into the flour mixture and combine well. Knead dough until dough is smooth and springs back when poked.
Place dough in a large bowl and cover with towel. Allow dough to prove for an hour.
Dough will expand to twice its original size. Punch down and divide doughs into 10 equal portions.
Roll into small balls, flatten and put filling into dough and wrap. Use a scissors to make 3 cuts at the closed side of the dough but don't cut till the end. You'll get 4 small strips all connected with the same end. Twist each small strip. Combine two strips side-by-side into one and roll the dough up into a twisted bun. Brush with egg wash and sprinkle black sesames.
Bake in preheated oven at 175ºC for 20 minutes.
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The best part about making bread is you get to do other things while the bread is proving, but the most difficult part is kneading the dough. My family does not believe in using a bread-maker or electric mixer to make bread, it has to be done the old-fashioned way, kneading with your own bare hands - with gloves of course for hygienic reason. My dad is the expert in this area. You have to have the eyes of a seasoned "kneader" to tell whether the dough is too wet or too dry. If it's too wet you'll need to add more flour and if it's too dry, more liquid. Not to worry though, practice makes perfect.
The kneading involved about 30 minutes of rolling, squeezing and thrusting body weigh onto the dough. At one point I was thinking of getting my nephew to stomp on the dough like how they extract juice out of grapes for wine. At least I was getting a good workout. I left the dough to proof and went out shopping.
I was happy to see the dough double in size when I was back. Now it's time for weighing, rolling and adding whatever fillings you want to the dough to form buns. We did green tea with sweet mung beans filling. Basically, add green tea powder to the dough to give it some green tea flavour.
The green tea milk bun was delicious. It was indeed light and pillowy with a milky taste. At first I thought the mung beans filling wouldn't go with the green tea but surprisingly it was very good. Something out of the ordinary.
However, when I took the bun out after a week, there was a strong alcohol smell. After some research I found out that this may be due to too much yeast used or because the dough was proved for too long both of which caused over fermentation. Strangely, the smell gets stronger when the bun is kept longer in the fridge. No yeast problem if the bun is eaten freshly baked.
Feel so lucky to be enjoying such a wonderful breakfast. You can too. Try it!
Happy baking! xx
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