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What is this recipe?

This is a sweet bread dough that’s meant to be used as a base for other recipes, such as cinnamon rolls, dinner rolls, monkey bread, and so on. It bakes into a soft, fluffy bread with a mild - but not overwhelming - sweetness to it.

It pairs well with warm spices like cinnamon and nutmeg, as well as tangy toppings like cream cheese frostings.

Why did I come up with it?

Cinnamon rolls are one of my favorite treats and have been all my life, so they were naturally one of the first things I wanted to learn how to make when I started baking. There are a lot of “good enough” recipes out on the internet for cinnamon rolls, and my recipe here is derived from a dough from one of them (which I’ve unfortunately long since lost the link to). However, they all lacked something - some tried too hard to imitate Cinnabon, some came out too dry, some lacked that subtle sweetness to the dough, my list of complaints goes on.

My goal was a dough that complements warmer spices like cinnamon as well as sweeter toppings like a vanilla glaze or a cream cheese frosting. I did not want this dough to merely be a vessel upon which those flavors sit, I wanted it to be a first-class citizen in the end product’s flavor.

How did I come up with it?

As mentioned above, this recipe is a descendent of a cinnamon roll dough recipe I found on the internet some time in the 2016-2018 timeframe. While I’ve lost the original recipe, the basics of it persist in mine: it is a brioche-like dough, utilizing both eggs and fat (in the form of butter in this recipe) as well as a higher dough hydration to help keep the end result soft and fluffy. A hefty amount of additional sugar as well as using milk instead of water helped give the dough a sweetness and a slightly more cakey texture to it.

My main complaints with the original dough were that it dried out too quickly and that it was too monotone in flavor. Morever, I wasn’t a fan that it was bordering on being a cake and couldn’t develop enough gluten to hold a good shape.

The first changes I made were to cut back the sugar and to replace half of the milk with water. This helped moderate the sweetness to my desired level, though it was still very monotonous in flavor. To deal with the flavor, I swapped out some of the flour for whole-wheat flour, which added a little nuttiness but made the dough more dense. The original recipe called for bread flour, so I swapped the remaining bread flour for all-purpose flour, which lightened things up a little bit but pushed me closer to a cakier texture again. From there, it was a battle of balancing the flour types, butter, and eggs.

While I did reach something I was mostly happen with for a while, I still wasn’t satisfied with how long the rolls laster before they started drying out. Around 2021, I started teaching myself how to make dinner rolls, and one thing I learned about in that process is something called tangzhong, a type of milk paste. It’s made by cooking a little bit of flour in water and milk below boiling point until it turns into a thick paste. This is then added to the dough early in the mixing process, and it helps both with the texture of the bread as well as its shelf life before drying out and staling.

The addition of the tangzhong was a game-changer, and the resulting dough was so good that I started using it as the base for recipes other than cinnamon rolls.

What’s needed for this recipe?

This is a more briochey dough, so it requires more than just flour, water, and yeast. You’ll need:

• Either:
  • All-purpose flour and whole-wheat flour, OR
  • Bread flour
• Eggs
• Milk
• Butter
• Sugar
• Salt
• Yeast

You’ll also need a pan to cook the tangzhong in, and either a stand mixer or a bread machine to make the dough in. I strongly recommend you do not attempt to mix and knead this dough by hand. Unfortunately, with the level of hydration and fat in this dough, it’s far too sticky to work by hand and it will be a nightmarish experience. While I understand that not everyone has these specialized tools, this is not a recipe that was designed to be made without them.

What are the basic steps?

From a high-level:

1. Measure ingredients, keeping the flour, milk, and water for the tangzhong separate.
2. Cook the tangzhong, set aside to cool.
3. Bloom yeast if necessary and mix the wet and dry ingredients along with the tangzhong but not the butter.
4. Slowly mix in the butter after the dough starts to come together.
5. Knead for a bit.
6. Rise, shape, divide, proof, bake!

Tips and tricks?

This dough is incredibly sticky and isn’t fun to work with by hand. I recommend getting a bowl scraper to help you remove it from the mixing bowl or bread machine pan, and a bench scraper to help you work with the dough on your countertop. You will benefit from a heavily floured work surface during when you shape and divide it.

Making the tangzhong will probably take you some practice. Do not let the milk and water boil, or it’ll never turn into a proper paste. You also don’t want to cook it for too long or else it will become too thick. The ideal consistency is a lightly runny but thick paste, almost like a thicker glue. Depending on your pan, you’ll probably want to kill the heat before it reaches that point, as the residual heat will continue to cook it.

I am a proponent of using bread machine yeast or instant yeast in almost all scenarios, and this recipe is included in that. Active dry yeast does not provide any benefit here, all it will do is add a yeast blooming step to the process. Bread machine/instant yeast does not need to be bloomed, though it does still benefit from being mixed with warm milk and water to dissolve it and help get things started.

The consistency of your butter is of critical importance to this recipe! Do not use cold butter! I repeat, do not use cold butter! It will not incorporate into the dough and you will have a bad time. Also do not use melted butter - it’ll incorporate, but the resulting texture will be off. You want to soften the butter, and perhaps a little more than you might be used to with other recipes. It should be soft enough to easily press a finger into and leave a deeper dent, but not so soft that it is greasy, deforms into a mess, or starts to get runny.

If you don’t have whole-wheat flour, don’t like the taste, or are otherwise opposed to using it, you can swap out the total amount of all-purpose plus whole-wheat for bread flour instead. I’m less impressed with the flavor you get from this, especially when paired with cinnamon, but you should get about the same texture and consistency.

Use good quality eggs, if you can afford it. While they’re not the biggest contributor to flavor, better quality eggs will still help add to the richness of the dough. That said, the cheapest mass-produced eggs will still work fine and I’m guilty of using them myself when I’m making a bulk amount of this dough.

Speaking of eggs, they should be room temperature. A trick to speed up bringing them to room temperature is to place them in a bowl of slightly warm water for 5-10 minutes. If you do this before you start measuring the other ingredients and making the tangzhong, then the eggs should be ready by the time you need them.

The Recipe: Sweet Bread Dough