Extremely Soft Milk Bread (Tangzhong Method)

One loaf of this bread was just not enough. I needed a slice or two of it per day.

I come back home in the evening, there’s London all around, millions of people that all look more successful than me, there’s rain on my hair, light and transparent that I could not see it from the window before leaving the office. I don’t know what I am doing here and why I am so far from my family and my people, but everything would make sense, or at least a bit more sense, if I could have a piece of artisan made bread, without preservative, calcium propionate & friends.

But this bread was gone in two days only (sic!). The third day saw me staring at the crumbs with melancholy. Because, well, who knows when I’ll have again time and energy to bake it according the Tangzhong method.

Not that this TangZhong thing implies complicate procedures and long preparation time. No, no. The bread could not be my type of bread, otherwise. It’s just one step more when you mix 1 part of flour with 5 parts of water, wait for this paste to cool down and add it into other ingredients of the bread dough. Et voila’.

I might have been a baker in my previous life. No, I cannot boast particularly great baking skills (sometimes I get confused with the powders and mix wrong ingredients, like when I made a pizza with bicarbonate of soda) but I like to believe I had a chance to work on something simple, natural and popular, a staple in everyone’s life. Something that used to be a staple in my diet and that now is just a kind of luxury (I told you why I don’t buy commercial bread, right?). Baking bread might be one of the few things able to reconnect me with a familiar world, far from the metropolis of thousands of fake flavors and mundane encounters.

p.s. Don’t you love the word Tangzhong? Tangzhong, Tangzhong, Tangzhong… have you ever tried it?