Lucy’s Half and Half TangZhong Hokkaido Bread
We have sausages and hamburger burning a hole in our freezer but we needed buns for both. This recipe makes the best buns especially if you make it like Lucy does.
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She starts with Floyd’s recipe that you can find by searching Hokkaido Milk Bread on The Fresh Loaf. Her changes are few but important. First, she cuts the recipe in half because we don’t need buns for an army.
Second where ever you see water or milk in the recipe we substituted Half and Half. The 2 T of butter was increased to 3 T. we had to put in quite a bit more AP flour, 25% more (100 g), because the dough was just way, way too liquid. Floyd said his was too dry using the original water and milk.
This was the guy that drew this picture 40 years ago in Drawing 2 class as a 2nd semester freshman
We changed the process. We made a 100% hydration poolish with H&H, 75 g of AP flour and pinch of instant yeast and let it percolate on the 85 F degree counter for 4 hours. We also held back the butter, egg and sugar until the rest of the ingredients were mixed for 10 minutes on KA 4 using the dough hook.
We want the gluten to be at least partially developed and the flour hydrated well before adding fats and sugars to an enriched dough. Once the egg, sugar and butter went in we beat the heck out of for another 5 minutes and noticed it was way too wet.
We added the extra flour and continued beating it for another 10 minutes – 25 minutes total before it pulled a nice windowpane. Highly enriched breads are the only ones I ever make sure can pull a windowpane.
Tall, Taller, Tallest bread
ever!The final changes were that we divided the dough by eye into 3 parts for final proofing in my favorite pan - the tall Oriental Pullman. Last time we proofed it lid on Pan De Mie style so this time we proofed it lid off to see how much it really would rise and spring. We did brush it with H&H before going in and coming out of the oven.
Jalapeno double thick double apple wood smoked bacon. 1 year aged hard Swiss cheese, caramelized onions, crimini and shiitake mushrooms, lettuce and tomato hamburger on an onion bun.
When it had cooled we noticed when we took it out of the pan that the part touching the pan was damp. As luck would have it the oven was still 200 F because of the 2 stones so we out the loaf back in on the rack between the stones to dry it off. It worked great
The last change was that we baked the bread for nearly 1 hour at 350 F with steam for the first 30 minutes. It took longer to bake this bread to 196 F – the perfect temperature for a bread like this one. It rose sprang and browned beautifully but one has to ask…… what happened to the buns you needed?
This bread is shredably soft, moist sweet and delicious. It toasts perfectly. Yummmmm....
I went to the grocery store today and low and behold they had bakery 8 count, Hot Dog and Onion Hamburger buns on sale for 99 cents each – day old. Lucy can barely make them for that! We had hamburgers tonight on onion buns and we have some great sandwich bread that is half Chinese, half Japanese with a little French in there somewhere.
Can’t wait to see the inside.