Milk Loaf Attempt #5

Determination is my middle name.

So here’s my 5th attempt at baking the milk loaf I failed at several times before.  I made sure to NOT add the salt directly with the yeast and I warmed up the mixture of milk, sugar, salt and butter before mixing it to the flour and yeast.  Also, another seasoned baker friend of mine told me that the egg should be at room temperature (not taken directly from the refrigerator).  So I had already taken the egg out a day earlier.

Everything was all set.

My KitchenAid went to work and I left the dough to rise.  After 1.5 hours, it didn’t rise all that much, only a smidgen. Bummer 🙁

But I proceeded anyway, to knead it a little manually and the left it to rise again.  At this point, I had to go out to fetch the kids, so the dough had more than the allocated time of 15 minutes for the second rise.

When we came home, unfortunately the rising of the dough had not reached my expectations yet, nevertheless, I shaped it up and placed it in the baking pan, and yeah…left it to rise yet again.

…and this time it rose! 🙂

Big time.

Here’s the resulting loaf of milk bread I made.

Oh, the whitish part on the lower left is just the flour from the bread pan.  I used it to prevent the loaf from sticking to the pan.

The loaf looked a tad too brown though, but oh…it was deliciously SOFT on the inside!  Just the way a perfect milk loaf should taste like!

It was delicious eating the bread just plain without anything, but I do admit that my bread-slicing skills do have much to be desired…I’m still working on getting those perfectly thin slices of homemade bread.  Well maybe I just need a good bread knife, eh? 🙂

We did buy a metal bread pan today, so I’m excited to see how that works out compared to the glass pan. 🙂