I hate baking bread and I’ll stand by that statement time and time again. I want instant satisfaction and quick shortcuts, hence my love for box mixes. I will happily pay other bakers for their delicious sourdough loafs because I will not leave a jar of sourdough starter on the counter of my kitchen. If I have to feed it, it’s a pet and not a baked good. Unfortunately for me, anytime I ask my husband for inspiration on what to bake or what he craves dessert wise, his only answer is bread. While at the gym, perusing dessert videos on Facebook, as one does, I found this recipe and got immediately excited about making it. It looks fluffy and delicious in the video as the recipe creator rips it apart and I just want to sink my teeth into it. I am never excited about a bread recipe so I started baking it the next day.
Now this recipe is mostly in video format with bad translations. The author does list the ingredient quantities in the comment section but for the most part, they are promoting their cookbook you can purchase so the full recipe is not located on a website or similar. The video is linked here. I have also attached a screenshot of the recipe in the comment section.
The video format, the bad translations, and the lack of direction all combined into the perfect storm. So please heed my warning:
If the recipe is clearly translated from one language to another, do not proceed. Save yourself the stress and anger by just Google searching the item you want to bake and find another recipe originally in your language. Unfortunately recipes are one of those things that translates the worst especially with ingredient conversions. For example, in this video the recipe creator is using a mixer and kneading the dough and the text on the video says “no mixer, use hands Mix to form a dough”. I have no doubt that this creator has a good recipe but for someone with little to no baking experience, this is going to be the most confusing and stressful baking experience if you follow these Facebook recipes that originate from another language or worse, AI.
There are little to no instructions in this video. You just have to guess. I do have bread making experience from my time in culinary school so the process is familiar to me. You start by combining the warm milk, sugar, and yeast then mixing until the yeast is fully combined to activate the yeast. They don’t specify the temperature of the milk either which is usually very important for bread, too hot kills the yeast, too cold will not activate it. So already I’m concerned with this recipe working out. I combined the ingredients then added the flour and salt as stated, combined, then the butter. At this point you now need to knead the dough for 5 minutes. The dough was dry and not very elastic and at this point, I decided the recipe was shit and all my hopes of fluffy croissant bread vanished. I went back to Facebook and started searching the comments for some person saying they had baked it successfully. This I did not find. What I did find was someone asking how many eggs were used and the author stating 1 in the dough and 1 for egg wash. Record scratch. What? One in the dough? Where?
I watched the video multiple times very carefully and found nowhere did it list an egg outside of the egg wash. After about my 10th rewatch, I finally found a slight hint of yellow being added into the bowl. On the first step. Sigh. Have I mentioned I hate making bread? And using recipes that are translated?
After some quick reddit research I found people have been successful with adding their egg in after the knead step. So I stopped my rise and began adding the egg which is easier said than done. The very dry dough would not accept my egg offering and I had to start by kneading it into the dough by hand, which was messy and miserable. Finally I got it incorporated enough to put it back into the mixer to knead all over again. I’m sure there’s concern of over mixing but at this point I’m just trying to pretend I didn’t just waste all of my household ingredients on a lump of garbage.
The dough came back together into a much nicer consistency and I left it to rise. Again. After an hour I returned to the dough. It had risen but definitely didn’t look like the loose wet dough in the video. Next you take the dough out and divide it into 4 equal portions. This part looked exactly like the video so maybe there’s hope. Then you roll each of the 4 portions out flat and ideally all into the same size and rectangular shape. Then you spread softened butter on top of one layer of dough, top it with another layer, and repeat with more butter, another layer, more butter, and then the top layer. The video didn’t state an amount of butter but the written recipe said almost 1/2 cup. I started with 1/4 cup, a half stick, and used the video as a visual guideline on how much to spread between layers and used only the 1/4 cup of butter. Yet another inconsistency in this recipe. I’m definitely regretting trying this out. I’m just really hoping I get good, tasty bread at the end. Then the dough gets wrapped up and put in the fridge for 40 minutes. And guess what? This isn’t even the final rise step. Sigh.
After chilling in the fridge, the dough comes out and gets rolled out thin and it gets rolled up into a log. Then it is cut similarly to a cinnamon roll in small portions and these go into the bread pan and then of course, they rise for another hour. Finally we have made it to the final rise!
Once it has risen, you use an egg wash on top of the loaves and put them in the oven to bake. I’m so skeptical of the bake time. The video states 325°F for 25-30 minutes. The fact that this recipe did not even include a baking temp in Celsius is very odd to me. Not that I would use it but I expected it to originally be in Celsius based off of everything else so far. After 30 minutes, the bread was baked. It looked a little less great than the video and has less browning overall but smelled amazing.
Like the video recommended, I spread butter on top of the warm loaves and then I cut the bread open and found the beautiful flakey layers this recipe promised. I don’t know how we got here, everything that could go wrong with a recipe did go wrong and yet, I have two beautiful successful loafs of bread. I hate how tasty and soft this bread is because I would almost do this again. Maybe in a few months, or a year, when I have forgotten about my pain and suffering and the 4 hours it took me to make this bread.
This bread was pillowy soft and overall delightful. Do not skip the eggwash step because the nice crisp and flavor on the top of the bread was my favorite part. This bread was really good alone or topped with butter. My husband even buttered it then added cinnamon and sugar and found it was amazing that way as well. Do I recommend the recipe? If you want an aneurysm topped with buttery bread, then yeah go for it! Otherwise, I’m certain the internet is full of better recipes for you.
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