Shokupan/ aka Hokkaido milk bun

There is a kind of pull apart bread we eat in Mumbai / Bombay called pav .this recipe doesn’t taste anything like that.

What the$#@&-++, you must be thinking , why bother mentioning it then . because the Hokkaido milk bun hmb for short looks like pav ladi we get in India but tastes far better and is akin to a pav wearing foundation and make up sitting in a fancy car.

So the way to make it is also diffferent slightly more complex. We take a small amount of flour and milk and cook it to a paste. What this does is allow the rest of the dough when finished to get more soft and fluffy.( Because of complex chemical reactions..,you dont want to know all the details.

Flour 450+50 g
Milk 225+100 ml
Sugar 10 g
Salt-10 g
Yeast active dry-10 g

so now once we have weighed our stuff ,we measure out flour and take 50 g separate and cook it with 100 ml milk till it gets to be like a gel and gluey. This is called Yudane in Japan and tangzhong in china.we are not going to sit and examine which one came first or why they even work. Suffice it to say that they do.

Then you add the rest of the liquid ( milk ) in this case to the gluey mix and whisk it up .cool it till gets blood warm then add the sugar salt flour and yeast in that order.dont change the order otherwise you could kill the yeast.Also don’t put in yeast in hot dough which also is the way of the seppuku( honorable suicide ), because yeast will die above 50 odd degree and you will be left with a stone to pelt at your enemies .Bam blam..whiz..

Add 20 g of butter and 20 ml oil to dough and knead it in

Ok so we have arrived at that happy moment where the dough has been amalgamated and yeast is ready to multiply and make CO2 to make holes and allow your dough to rise. For this at home what I do is heat up water in the microwave and keep the dough next to it .( In a bowl).