What Is Milk Bread? What’s So Special About It?
Milk bread is an Asian style of soft, buttery, and slightly sweet bread. There are variations in Japan (where it’s known as shokupan) as well as China. In Chinese bakeries, you’ll find milk bread in various forms: loaves, sliced, pull-apart buns, and as the basis for a wide variety of Hong Kong Style bakery buns. If you’ve ever had a baked Chinese BBQ Pork Bun (Char Siu Bao), Pineapple Bun, or Hot Dog Bun, you know what we’re talking about. Milk bread is light, incredibly fluffy, and tears apart in melt-in-your-mouth strands. Milk bread dough is an enriched dough, which means it has dairy (milk, cream, and/or butter), eggs, oil, and/or sugar added to it. It is softer and richer than regular breads, which are made with primarily flour, water, salt, and yeast. Other examples of enriched doughs include brioche, challah, and cinnamon roll dough. (We actually make the FLUFFIEST cinnamon rolls with this recipe as a base—try it!) This Japanese/Chinese style of milk bread also influenced another similar style of bread—Hawaiian Sweet Bread, or Sweet Rolls. But how is this soft fluffiness achieved?
A Simple Milk Bread Recipe, with Wholesome ingredients
There are many milk bread recipes on the internet, and many of them are quite complicated.
Some require a traditional Chinese method, known as tangzhong, which is a cooked flour and liquid mixture that gets added to the dough. Other recipes require dough enhancers, also known as dough improvers or dough conditioners.
However, we never got consistent results with the tangzhong method. And we didn’t want to use chemical dough conditioners, which aren’t in people’s normal baking pantries anyway.
Plus, no matter how closely I followed many of these recipes on other blogs and Chinese recipe sites alike, I was never satisfied with the outcome. Often, they wouldn’t come out anything like the picture! This futile search went on for about a year.
So where did this milk bread recipe finally come from? All along, it turned out that my cousin Heidi had the perfect recipe.
Not only is this the absolutely closest recipe I’ve tried to achieve the real-deal Asian milk bread you find in Chinese grocery stores and Chinatown bakery shops, it’s actually remarkably easy.
It has become the base recipe for all of our Chinese Bakery bun recipes. Since posting this recipe on January 17, 2015, thousands of our readers have made this bread part of their regular baking rotation!
In the gif below, you can really see the fluffy texture of this milk bread as it gets pulled apart:
The All-in-One Method
This recipe employs the all-in-one method. You add all the ingredients (including, surprisingly, the yeast) to the mixing bowl at the same time. You do have to make sure that the ingredients are at room temperature, and that they go into the mixing bowl in the order listed in the recipe, but it really is as easy as that. The yeast will dissolve into the liquid ingredients as the stand mixer (or your hands) combines everything together. Once you’ve mixed the dough (either with a stand mixer or by hand), proof it until it doubles in size. Then you knead and shape it, proof again, and bake. No fancy ingredients or complicated steps. The final product, as you can see from our photos, is fluffy, soft, slightly sweet, and golden. What’s not to love about it? My cousin told me that she’d been making this bread for years: two loaves a week. I can’t believe I didn’t think to ask her sooner. Ah well, all the stars eventually aligned, and I am now dizzy with happiness. Now that this search is over, I am going to start on the next recipe on my ever-growing list. But before I do, I am eager to share this super easy milk bread recipe with you so you can enjoy the fruits of my (mostly unnecessary) labor. There are many other creative ways to use this great milk bread recipe. Examples of other recipes you can make using this milk bread:
Hot Dog Buns Pineapple Buns Chinese Roast Pork Buns (Baked Char Siu Bao) Coconut Buns (Cocktail Buns) Inside Out Coconut Buns Pork Sung Buns Cinnamon Raisin Buns
We’ve even used this recipe as a base to make the most delicious croissants!
Asian Milk Bread Recipe Instructions
In the bowl of a stand mixer, add the ingredients in the following order: Use the dough hook attachment, and turn the mixer on to “stir.” Let it go for 15 minutes, occasionally stopping the mixer to push the dough together. The dough should stick to the bottom of the bowl, but not the sides. If you’re in a humid climate and the dough is sticking to the sides of the mixing bowl, add a little more flour 1 tablespoon at a time until it comes together. If you don’t have a mixer and are kneading by hand, extend the kneading time by 5-10 minutes. After 15 minutes of mixing, the dough is ready for proofing. Cover the bowl with a damp towel and place in a warm spot until the dough doubles in size (1-2 hours). A great way to do this is to put the dough in a closed microwave, with a mug of just-boiled water next to it. In the meantime, grease two baking vessels on all sides with butter. I used a standard loaf pan and a 9-inch round cake pan. After the first proofing, put the dough back in the mixer. Stir for another 5 minutes to get rid of air bubbles. Dump the dough on a lightly floured surface, and cut it in half. I made a loaf with one half of the dough and rolls with the other half. To make the loaf, shape the dough dough half into a rough rectangle. Cut it into 3 pieces, and place them in the loaf pan. With the other half of the dough, I cut it into eight equal pieces. Then I rolled them with my hands into 8-inch long ropes. Fold each “rope” in half and twist it 3-4 times. Then, twist the entire piece in on itself to make a knot. There’s no right or wrong way to achieve the knot. Just make sure that the dough gets twisted in on itself and the you’re not pulling ends through the knot. It’s should be round in shape with nothing poking out when you’re done. Then you can place them seam-side down in your greased round pan. Once shaped, let the dough proof for another hour, covered. Position a rack in the middle of the oven, and preheat to 350° F/175°C. Brush the risen dough with egg wash. Bake for 23-25 minutes. Remove from the oven to a cooling rack. Brush the buns with the sugar water/simple syrup to give them a really great shine, sweetness, and color. To borrow a line from Ina Garten, “how easy was that?”
