Milk Bread

Milk bread (pain au lait) is one of those standard French breads that was heavily drilled into us while in culinary school. There are a zillion recipes for it (here is the culinary school recipe I've made several times). In need of a good basic loaf this week, I went for a different milk bread recipe, this time from my Le Cordon Bleu Complete Cook book, which is just excellent. The recipe is for buns (petits pains au lait) but I just shaped the dough into a loaf and...forgot that it was proofing...Yeah, not my prettiest loaf by far, but still edible and it makes great toast. The texture was a bit crumbly, so I prefer the other milk bread recipe, but this one did the trick, and now I know that I need to put the timer on when I'm proofing something in addition to putting it on when I bake something! We live and learn.

Milk Bread/Pain au Lait (adapted by me from the recipe on page 462 of Le Cordon Bleu Complete Cook)

1 tbsp instant yeast
1 tbsp sugar
4 cups bread flour
1 tsp salt
1 1/2 - 2 cups milk
2 tbsp melted butter

Directions here.

And here is my loaf...