Tangzhong Is the Key to Making the Softest Bread You’ve Ever Tasted
Winter is my bread season. Not in the food sense – please, this is a year-round practice – but in the baking sense. While I love a crunchy seeded batard or a tomato-flecked focaccia, I find that eating a soft bun spread with butter gives me a meditative-like experience. For soft, tender buns that will stay soft for days, add tangzhong to your bread dough.
What is Tangzhong?
Tangzhong is a gelatinized starch paste made by heating flour with milk or water. Adding tangzhong to the dough is a traditional Chinese technique for making soft bread, including but not limited to soft steamed buns. It can be added to any yeast bread recipe that needs to be soft.
Why does this work?
Besides tasting damn good, starches are prized for their ability to thicken and gelatinize when exposed to water and heat. Tangzhong is no different. The flour is cooked with a liquid, and during the process the starch molecules interact with the water and hold it in, swelling and gelatinizing. When you precook some of the bread flour with water in this manner, you can increase the overall hydration of the bread dough without sacrificing the texture and stability of the raw dough. If you add excess liquid without first trapping it in the gelatinous starch bubbles, the bread dough will become extremely sticky, making it difficult to shape and possibly becoming too heavy, causing it to rise poorly.
Gelatinized starch, swollen with water, will add elasticity and moisture to the entire loaf of bread, resulting in tender, springy buns that you can tear and shove straight into your mouth; finely crumbled, sliced loaf for sandwich bread; or firm but soft and thick French toast. Although starch retrogradation will still occur, tangzhong will give you several days of soft, doughy bread.
How to cook tangzhong?
Making tangzhong is similar to making roux (a paste made by heating oil, flour and liquid), but it’s even simpler. To make tangzhong, whisk one part flour with four or five parts liquid in a saucepan until smooth. Turn the heat to medium. I switch to a rubber spatula because it makes better contact with the pan. Stir the mixture constantly until it thickens. For a small amount of tangzhong, it will only take about one minute. Remove the pan from the heat and let it cool to room temperature before adding it to the rest of the bread recipe.
Can you Tangzhong have any bread recipe?
I’ve used this Japanese milk bread recipe from King Arthur Baking several times and it’s a great starter recipe with helpful GIFs and pictures if you’re new to tangzhong. The step by step instructions don’t say this, but my only advice is to dissolve the milk powder in the whole milk first when you get to the dough section.
Otherwise, you can add the tangzhong component to any bread recipe that you prefer to make it firmer and softer. This will require some experimentation depending on the recipe ingredients and your existing hydration level. Start small, using about 5% of the total flour to make tangzhong. In the King Arthur recipe I linked above, you can see that they only use two tablespoons of flour to make tangzhong. That’s only 14 grams of flour compared to the 300 grams used in the rest of the recipe.
Try a ratio of one part flour to four parts liquid by weight . Take as much flour as indicated in the recipe. In other words, after you measure out the total amount of flour, scoop out a tablespoon or two from this bowl. Whisk and cook, adding liquid in addition to the amount called for in the recipe. Since a lot of it is about making sure the bread dough retains extra hydration, this is where you need to add the extra water. The starch will absorb this water, so adding extra is a good way to keep the finished dough from becoming too stiff. (You can read here to learn more about calculating increased hydration in your recipe.)
Once the tangzhong is ready and you have cooled it to room temperature, add it to the bowl after the yeast has risen, along with all the other dough ingredients. Continue mixing and proofing as directed in the recipe. Your bread will bake tall and fluffy, with a fine, tender crumb. Its godlike. (Angels and gods definitely eat bread made with pre-gelatinized starch.) Try it for your next batch of soft buns. You will swear to this.