1 Buttery Dough, 3 Perfect Recipes | Claire Saffitz | Try This at Home | NYT Cooking

the most physical activity i've done in a year hey everyone i'm claire saffids i am here today for another episode of try this at home today i'm going to show you my recipe for an all-purpose enriched dough that takes the best of all worlds from japanese milk bread and brioche very very soft super pillowy it's only a little bit sweet and just gives you this incredibly light almost like silky texture the base recipe for this enriched dough is just to make it into two loaves but i'm also going to show you hamburger buns then i'm also going to make sweet pistachio morning buns just to show off how versatile it is and how it can go sweet and savory an enriched dough is a dough that has basically some form of fat added to it so like a lean dough is a sourdough where all we're working with is flour and water and yeast and salt an enriched dough has fat often that means eggs are added so you have the yolks and it's adding richness in the dough that way or sometimes it can be butter sometimes it can be oil so today we're actually going to do all of those we're adding oil and eggs and butter even with all of those sort of heavier ingredients because of the technique we're using it still creates something so light and fluffy and that's what's amazing about this recipe it's sort of a pre-step that we're doing before we mix the dough this is something called a tangjong this is a technique that's used in japanese milk bread but also in a lot of different kind of recipes to increase the overall ability of the dough to hold onto moisture and liquid and that results in a very soft pillowy dough and it works really really well in this style bread a tongzhang is sort of like a roux it is a mixture of flour and liquid that's cooked on the stove so the heat is not on i'm just going to whisk these together and now when it's all mixed together and smooth i can turn on the heat as this mixture cooks the starches are gelatinizing and the whole mixture will thicken up quite a bit and it will totally transform and then this is going to get added to the dough i sort of liken it to a smooth mashed potato that is what you're going for so now it's starting to thicken it goes from liquid to this kind of thick paste really fast and i've taken it off the heat now now i'm going to transfer this mixture and scrape it into the bowl of the stand mixer now this next part is very important this mixture is hot i don't know if you can see but there's steam coming off of it i really want to let this cool completely you will regret it if it's warm the dough basically won't properly come together if you want to make this straight through you can rush the cooling process a little bit by throwing this in the fridge and stirring it every so often so that's what i'm going to do and now it's cooled it has more or less the same texture you can see it's thickened a little bit now we're going to go ahead and mix everything right in the bowl on top of our tangjong the next thing i'm adding is a little bit of oil you can use vegetable oil olive oil any kind of oil you have the purpose of this is just to add some fat that is liquid at room temperature this means that you can leave the dough whether it's hamburger bun or just the loaf on your counter for many many days and it won't dry out i mean it's not a ton of sugar but it also is balanced out by a healthy amount of salt so it's sort of a flavor enhancer and a texture enhancer so i'm using active dry yeast in this recipe i'm not gonna proof this yeast i'm not gonna take it and dissolve it in a warm liquid you know in my entire baking career i have very very rarely encountered active dry yeast that wasn't alive and then the remainder of the flower okay so i have my dough hook on the mixer so this is going to help us develop lots of gluten which is key here i want to develop a very very strong dough the dough rises so tall in the oven if it didn't if it wasn't a strong dough it couldn't support itself as it rises generally speaking i like to make recipes by hand so this is a recipe where you do want to use a stand mixer if you have super human strength and patience you can try it by hand i do not recommend it this is what happens when you're mixing bread dough it almost always looks really dry in the beginning it takes time for that flour to absorb all the liquid and then you'll see there's a pretty radical transformation in texture for anyone that has even a passing interest in making bread i would say buy yourself one of these i think they cost one dollar this is called a bowl scraper there's a lot of like bowl scraping in this recipe because it is a very soft dough you can really see it in this glass bowl i'm just going to scrape down the sides now that this dough has come together and i had it on low i'm going to put it back i'm going to now let it go on medium low so a little bit faster than we had it before and like go change your laundry go do something come back once or twice scrape down the sides but this is going to go for like a good 12 to 15 minutes by letting it go low and slow it'll be a very dramatic transformation in the texture it's looking good so first of all you can see that the dough has gathered around the hook but it's not clearing the sides or the bottom so you can see it's you know it's sticking um that's normal that's fine it's mostly tacky and just a little bit sticky i can kind of touch it and it won't stick to my finger but if i were to like you know really work with it i would get some sticking lightly the dough is looking good we're going to start to add the butter as i said in the beginning this dough incorporates techniques from a number of different styles of bread we did the tongshong from japanese milk bread and this is sort of more similar to the steps in a brioche recipe and i'm going to mix on low speed heat is kind of the enemy of this process i want the butter to be cold that's really important we want to have this just be mixed on low speed until we see the butter disappear and then i'll add the other half there's a lot of this in recipe developing just like sitting and watching it very great british baking show i do the thing that they do also where i like fan the thing and it comes out of the oven i see that the butter has fully absorbed and i'm gonna add the other half of the butter but first give it a scrape okay i'm not telling you to like sit here for a half an hour and mix because it's like funny or fun it's important you can see that the dough is now fully gathered around the hook it's not sticking to the sides i now want to increase the speed back to that medium low and we are going to give it a final mix in the bowl we are going for a super supple beautiful smooth dough we made brioche in culinary school by hand and you just have this like super sticky mask that you're like just like you're kind of smearing butter into it and just like working and kind of like folding onto itself like eventually it comes together but yeah and i'm going to show you a test for knowing if you've mixed it sufficiently or not enough i'm going to pull off like a golf ball size piece right this is called a window pane test you might see this in bread books especially on sourdough baking and i'm going to work it outward and the idea is that i've i have built enough gluten and the dough is extensible enough meaning the ability to stretch that i can get a very very thin sheet of dough that will allow light to pass through and it won't break so i want to see if i'm there yet it actually looks i think i'm there like i'm getting it pretty thin and it's not tearing so i'm going to take it out of the bowl now what we want to do is let this dough go through its first rise generally recipes with active dry yeast go through two rises so the first one is called bulk so that's just the whole massive dough all together so i'm going to fold this dough in half a few times because i want to get sort of a smooth surface then form it into a nice tidy sort of package you can see that the texture is first of all not sticky or not even really that tacky the butter has kind of lubricated it so it's got a slight sheen on it if your dough is shiny and greasy looking it's probably too warm just roll with it it'd probably be fine but just know that you don't want this dough to get very warm this dough has a really wonderful texture it's very tactile it's really fun to play with and i'm just going to set this right back inside the bowl i'm going to let this hang out at room temperature for about half an hour and that's because i want the yeast to begin to you know release those gases and metabolize some of those starches and sugars and then i'm going to transfer it to the fridge and let it continue and finish its rise very slowly in the refrigerator and that's because this dough is so much easier to work with when it's cold it's like we get it going by 30 minutes at room temperature and then it slowly finishes the rise as it cools down and firms up in the fridge you could let this go overnight and in fact like i set up some dough last night that is ready to go but if you want to bake same day just make sure you give it at least four hours in the fridge and that's long enough for the dough to finish rising and also to get cold all the way to the center four hours minimum up to 24 into the fridge i have two standard loaf pans here i'm gonna line them with parchment paper so here's a little bit of room temp butter i'm gonna brush the bottoms and all the sides one way to show off the really wonderful texture and browning properties of this dough is to bake them as straight loaves and then you can choose to do anything you want with them you can use it for sandwich bread you can make bostock which is a style like a twice baked brioche which is a delicious and very easy pastry you can just have it for toast for breakfast which i did a lot while i was testing i like to line loaf pans with one piece of parchment that goes across the bottom and up the longer sides the width of the parchment is the same as the width of the pan across the bottom and then you just lay it inside and now we've greased it so the parchment something to stick to smooth it out make sure there's no air bubbles and now you have not only guarantee that nothing will stick to the bottom but you have a means of lifting the dough out with these two little pieces that hang over i'm also brushing the parchment with butter not because it would stick but because that butter across all the surfaces is going to contribute to browning and i want it to be golden and like a little bit even a tiny bit crispy so my loaves are ready to go i can set these aside i'm going to use this scale to portion out the dough into 16 even pieces and basically i'm going to get eight little pieces that make up each loaf so i'll show you how it works first of all look at how beautiful and domed it got this basically doubled in size i'm going to turn it out of the bowl and onto the surface i'm going to pat the dough down and try to knock out some of the gases this step basically will help to re-feed the yeast so all those yeasts which are live organisms when i do this step it's basically going to help them come into contact with new forms of food you know new sugars and starches so that's going to be helpful in our second rise i'm going to use the scale to measure out 16 equal portions i'm going to do eight portions per pan okay now i have all my portions so now i'm going to show you how to form each piece into a nice taut tall little ball they are going to rise up and fuse together in the oven like cute patterned little pull apart loaf if you were just to kind of create something that was more like a loaf shape it's less predictable and the way that it expands sometimes you get like a crack down the middle or it splits this gives the loaf a natural seam where it can kind of start to pull apart in the oven so i have a piece of dough here this i could tell this side is smoother this i can tell it was part of the dome that was exposed on the top this side is smoother this side is a little bit more mottled so here's what i do i sort of flatten it out and it's smooth side down so now that i have this kind of a regular shape they're kind of triangular rectangular-ish now i'm going to go around and i'm going to tuck all of the irregular edges in toward the center so just kind of go around and fold everything in and now i want to gather all of those edges together and pinch so you can see now i have this little ball shape and it almost looks like a garlic bulb or kind of a very fat teardrop now i'm going to put it on the surface this time seam side down just like that taking one hand and i'm cupping it around the dough so my hand is sort of in the shape of a claw and it's resting lightly over the dough and the motion here is little rapid circles and i as i'm moving the dough in a circle i'm also dragging it across the surface you'll feel the ball of dough start to tighten and become like taller it'll sit up a little higher there's like the seam side there's the dome side and then it just goes right into your pan okay we have all the little dough balls in their formation and they're ready to go these have to proof so there's quite a bit of expanding that happens during the proof and then there's even more expansion that happens in the oven and that's called oven spring so it really does grow quite a bit in size the proof time it's been about an hour these are looking about there doubled in size there's really no gaps left in between little balls of dough there's something called the poke test which is a means of determining if your dough has fully proofed so i'm just poking on the top of the dome press your finger in that looked pretty good you can see there's my little fingerprint but it mostly sprang back the final step is to give them an egg wash and then try to brush gently because you don't want to pop any air bubbles that are underneath the surface okay [Music] you'll see this wonderful almost like cartoon bread loaf shape they smell really really good [Music] there are myriad uses for this style of dough it's so versatile i don't know it's like i'm not really liable to make hamburger buns but it works so well that's what we're doing today i'm going to make some hamburger buns i have a dough that i set up actually last night you can see that i got super puffy in the fridge and it's very firm because all that butter is cooled down so you want to work with this dough while it's cold because it's much firmer and it's just easier to handle so when it comes to the forming stage try to work with some amount of speed i want to portion this into 10 pieces of dough all equal size so it makes 10 hamburger buns for like four to six ounce patty of any kind so i have two baking sheets here but i'm just using some neutral oil and brushing the baking sheets okay it's similar to that stuff i showed you earlier i want to do the same thing because when you shape something properly you get a beautiful even rise and i want a round beautifully domed hamburger bun okay and then just repeat that process with the remaining pieces of dough here are all 10 of our buns these need to rise again now this dough in particular likes to rise with a little bit of moisture i just have some like tap water here and i'm just going to basically like sprinkle on some water just a little bit so that things don't dry out these need to proof for like a nice long time and i'll come back and show you what they look like when they're proof these are ready to go i'm going to show you what they look like here's the test for whether or not these are approved there's a slight jiggle so i know that these are sufficiently proofed when i poke it i can see the dough slowly spring back and there's a slight indentation so these are ready [Music] just makes me think of like mcdonald's commercials like with like the perfectly placed sesame seeds you know these are going to go in the oven one pan per rack and then after 15 minutes i'm going to rotate and they'll go about 20 to 25 total it's easy to tell when they're done we're just looking for an even dark golden brown color they got so domed and so big and very excited either eat them the day or the next day and then freeze whatever you don't eat they freeze so well [Music] there's some power tools being used upstairs but we're going to roll with it what are they sawing should i like get a broom and i'm back on i think a sweet bun like a cinnamon roll or a sticky bun is maybe one of the best applications of this recipe because it stays so soft and what i don't like about a typical sticky bun or cinnamon roll is that they dry out and get really hard and with this dough they stay really soft and pillowy even after they've cooled oh geez all right i'm hurrying this reminds me of my first apartment in new york when my roommate and i like had this theory that our upstairs neighbors like had a bowling alley it turns out i actually think he was like a bodybuilder and was dropping weights on the wood floor i'm having flashbacks so this gives you a nice generous layer of butter so now i'm going to put together the filling i have here one cup of pistachios that i toasted so you can finally chop these i like how the pistachios and the filling give it like a little bit of a green kind of spiral in the final bun a fine chop is what i like to go for i'm gonna put together the rest of the filling this is a pretty austere morning bun and it just has a lot of toasted pistachios in it and some cardamom super delicious and has a ton of different textures in it now this recipe does not have icing it doesn't have like a goo the only topping is this sprinkle of this sugar mixture so i'm setting aside four tablespoons or one quarter cup of this mixture and this i'll set aside they'll go on top of the buns when they're baked now the remainder gets mixed with the pistachios and then this is our filling and now the last step is to create a little bit of honey butter i love the addition of honey i'm just using two tablespoons but it does contribute a whole lot of flavor so now i'm just melting the honey and the butter together most of that's going to go on the surface of the dough prior to sprinkling our pistachio mixture on top i'm going to reserve some of it for also brushing on top of the buns when they come out and that is going to give this reserved sugar mixture something to stick to my filling's ready to go i'm going to grab my dough and show you how to make the buns so i'm going to turn this out onto my lightly floured surface i'm going to roll it out into a fairly thin and wide slab the important thing with rolling out is like you want something that's as close to a rectangle as possible and that means that all of your buns are going to be the same size [Music] then i just kind of lightly press it in and i want even coverage across the entire surface so now i'm ready to start rolling i'm going to start at the end closer to me and i just kind of go like a little bit at a time from one end to the other and start to get the dough thinking about getting into a spiral [Music] i squeeze the roll a little bit and i try to work from the center outward and that just helps to like thin it out slightly and then make the entire thickness more regular and more even i can hear my mom being like don't cut on the counter my parents freaked out about stuff like that so you can see we have our really pretty little pistachio spirals these are going to go into the pan cut side up these have to rise again i'm going to cover them they are going to get nice and puffy this tray is ready to go so i'm going to show you what they look like they have puffed up quite a bit they are all touching it looks very good so this just gets brushed over [Music] between the tower pistachio buns the fast food commercial perfect hamburger buns and our cartoon loaves of bread it's a little overwhelming but i think that this really shows off the versatility of a dough of this style and the texture is just something that is like hard to beat just gonna pull off a little piece here i have one of the pistachio buns very lightly sweet to me this is the kind of thing you could eat in the morning and not feel like you needed a nap right after seriously so good obviously this is a very versatile recipe but you're not limited to just hamburger buns or pistachio morning buns or a loaf you could really use it in any number of applications and that is what is great about try this at home it's really about taking the learning from these recipes experimenting spreading your pastry and bread wings so i hope you enjoyed hashtag new york times cooking what is there a thing subscribe do or don't it's up to you [Music]

Channel: NYT Cooking

Views: 781,929

Keywords: cooking, cooks, recipes, recipe, how-to, how to, kitchen, new york times, new york times cooking, nyt cooking, nyt, nytimes, brioche, milk bread, japanese milk bread, tangzhong, butter, dough, morning bun, sesame seeds, hamburger bun, buns, fast food buns, dinner rolls, pull-apart, bread, loaf, pistachio, cardamom, cinnamon roll

Id: 4MV8QYd5sOg

Length: 23min 24sec (1404 seconds)

Published: Fri May 21 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/marshmallowlips]

I really like I’m there how she shows the basic recipes then gives you a few ideas on how to use them! She did the same with croissants.

[u/chaos_is_me]

Is there a video or quick guide that shows how to make eggs like that? That’s perfect for a breakfast sandwich.

[u/lucky_bamboo]

Would this bread work if made without butter? Obviously less delicious, but close?

[u/thayveline]

Hope this isn't rude but does anyone know how Felix is? I don't have IG but I checked some nothing about neither of the kittens. Watching the cornbread video now, but I am v invested in that tuxie boi 🥺