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Sourdough Hokkaido Milk Bread with Tangzhong

Japanese Hokkaido milk bread is pillowy soft with light buttery flavor and a hint of sweetness. It’s versatile enough to work as a dinner roll, for sandwiches from PB&J to ham and mustard, as breakfast toast or folded around a slab of ice cream as is popular in Singapore.

The tangzhong technique, where you make a roux of flour and milk (or water), allows the dough to hold more moisture, and the bread resists staling for days. I originally made this bread using commercial yeast and I mostly followed a recipe from the blog Cleobuttera, but I never have milk powder in my pantry so I made some modifications to work without it.

Recently, I decided I wanted to develop a sourdough version of this recipe to enhance the nutrition and flavor of the bread. There has been more news recently about the health benefits of sourdough leavening. For example, this article How Sourdough Bread is Helping People Eat Gluten Again discusses digestibility, and this article Metabolic Profiling of Sourdough Fermented Wheat and Rye Bread has considerable information about positive nutrient changes due to sourdough fermentation.

Mostly, though, I was looking to add the complex flavors that sourdough brings to bread. I also wanted to try to get a good Maillard reaction in an enriched sourdough, which is something I’ve had trouble with in the past. I’ve had to do extra milk-egg washes to get browning on sourdough that contains a lot of butter or oil, and I understood this to be a characteristic of my sourdough starter, as some people don’t have the same problem.

For the first sourdough Hokkaido milk bread I made, I simply took out the yeast and added ripe sourdough starter at approximately 16% of the flour weight (100g sourdough starter for 630g flour). The bread was a modest success. I did have to milk-wash it three times during the bake to induce even moderate browning, and it was a little less fluffy than my past yeast-leavened batches.