Baking Taiwanese Style Bread

January 29, 2007

Baking Taiwanese Style Bread

After taking a break from taking any cooking classes I was tempted once again to take this class because they offer to teach me how to make Taiwanese style bread that is so popular now in Indonesia. From what my Taiwanese husband told me, actually this style of bread was first made by Japanese but then later Taiwanese also made them too but they change the flavour to suit Taiwanese/Chinese taste more. So the main reason why I took this class is to made Richard happy if someday I can made him his favorite sweet bread. When I have time off course ....

The teacher's name for today class is Mr. Micha Hery K. I think he is a very good teacher. He is friendly and he is good at keeping our attention stays on him and his lesson. At the end of the class, he summaries again everything that he said to us. I really recommend his classes if you are interested on making a better bread!

So here is the basic recipe for the bread.

Basic Bread For 1 Kg Dough

Ingredients:
1000 gr Bread flour
15 gr Yeast
7 gr Bread Improver (Soft'r cotton Improver)
220 gr sugar
15 gr salt
50 gr milk powder
200 gr eggs
+/- 500 gr water
120 gr butter

Procedure:

Mixed the flour, yeast, bread improover, sugar, milk, egg first. (Tip: Don't mixed salt with yeast first.)
Add 2/3 water first, then add more little by little as needed. ( Tip: cold water works better! )
Knead it on the mixer on LOW for 2 minutes and then on HIGH for 8 minutes.
When the dough is good, you can mixed butter with salt and maybe coloring and then mixed them well with the dough.
Try to keep the dough at 28 degree Celcius temperature.
Let it rise for +/- 30 minutes
Start cutting the dough into smaller chunk, but try to make each chunk weight 50 gr.
Let it raise for the second time for 15 minutes.
Shape the dough .
Let it raise again for the last time +/- 1 hour. ( Tip: 80 % proof only or it may collapse if you let it raise to 100% or double in size )
Set the oven temperature into 180 C. Let it stay on that temperature for 15 minutes first before you put your bread in the oven.

Today Mr. Micha taught me to make :

Melon Bread
Monay's D Special
Green Bamboo
Rolled Mushroom
Sunflower Berry Bread

Pic: Sunflower Berry Bread

For Melon Bread Topping and Filling here is the recipe ...

Chocolate Filling: He use ready made creamfill chocolate filling, but he said that we can also made our own filling using this recipe: 100 gr instant custard mixed with 500 gr cassava flour. I prefer to use the chocolate.

For the Melon Bread Topping :
300 gr margarine mixed with 700 gr powder sugar
Then add with ...
300 gr eggs
1000 gr all-purpose flour
10 gr baking powder
10 gr melon essence ( it's already green color )

Pic: Pre-baked Melon Bread

Video: How to shape the melon bread and how to fill bread with 2 different types of filling.

Pic: Melon Bread

Pic: The filling of Melon Bread, on this case is the one that using cassava flour

Pic: Close up of pre-baked Melon Bread

Another tips he gave was to use egg wash first on some of the bread he made. He didn't mixed egg with water, but he just use egg with a pinch of salt.

Pic: Pre-baked Green Bamboo Bread

Pic: Piped the topping on top first

Pic: Dust the topping with powder sugar

Pic: Green Bamboo Bread

Green Bamboo

Topping:
180 gr egg white , beat it with 150 gr of sugar and 10 gr of cake emulsifier until it become a stiff meringue, then you add 180 gr of flour and 10 gr of green powder food coloring.

For Filling, again he just use instant vanilla custard.

Video: How to fill and shape the Green Bamboo, then later put the topping too.

I believe the reason why he kept using instant custard or instant chocolate filling is to keep this class as simple as possible for novice baker and plus... he was told to do this so that we will buy those instant custard from the store where we learn this lesson today....

More Video clips on how to make the breads ...