Hokkaido Milk Toast

After reading the blogs of many bread enthusiasts, I decided to try my luck to look for "bread bibles" at Pageone at Vivo City  3 weeks ago. I was looking for  65C烫种面包 by Yvonne C. and 孟老师的道面包.  

I was lucky to find copies of it, as based on what was said on the web, it was difficult to find in Singapore. These two books really contained a lot of information that is really useful to novice.

I decided to make Hokkaido Milk Toast. I managed to achieve all stages exactly as what was written in the book until the final proofing stage. My bread turned out to be a bit dense and that was not how Hokkaido Milk Toast should be. It ought to be fluffy and soft. However the taste was really good albeit the poor texture. I went back to the book and re-examined the recipe again and again! Alas, I finally found out what went wrong. My comprehension of CHINESE! During the final proofing, it states: 八分满. I interpreted it as 8 minutes for final proof, which I thought it was a little short. How silly!

The recipe for this can be found here.

Dry ingredients

汤种

Kneading in progress

  

Ready for 1st proof

Adequate proofing as the finger indent remained in place.

                                                    

Relaxing the dough before shaping(15 mins)

Shaping

Roll to about 30 cm in length, before rolling into a swiss roll.

Before going into the oven

My dense bread

I tried making another loaf a few days later, this time round, the loaf came out to be a lot better. It  was soft and fluffy. However, I could not control the baking temperature well. The top burned pretty fast, and I lowered the temperature to 170 degrees. More and trial and error the next time.

Second attempt

Soft bread

Nice cottony texture