The Pez Loaf
Welcome to our first ever
No Messin’ Projects post.
Today we focus on a collaborative project that we did with our good friends in Bar Pez.
The head chef at Pez, Simone, approached us last year after we had done a limited run of bread for Proper Order at the weekends. The loaf we made was loosely based on a style of milk bread from Japan called Shokupan. What makes Shokupan special is that it contains something called a Tangzhong, a thick paste made by cooking flour and milk or water until all the moisture is absorbed. We did a few tweaks and changes to the process to incorporate some of our pastry scraps and at the same time help us reduce waste during the summer time, which is typically a quiet time for us. So in place of the traditional Tangzhong we made a “soaker” made using milk/water and pastry scraps.
We’ll pause here to explain the term “Hydration” as it will help the next paragraph make sense. Hydration is the percentage of liquid you include in your dough recipe. Lower hyrdration doughs typically result in baked goods that are a little bit more dense and tighter while higher hydration doughs result in softer springier baked goods.
The smart part about including a soaker/ tangzhong is that it results in a dough that is a low hydration dough, it is easy to handle, manipulate and extremely easy to work with but when it bakes the hard work you’ve done incorporating moisture into the soaker/ tangzhong is released. When this moisture is released during baking it changes the crumb structure of the loaf, giving the texture and feel of a dough that has a much higher hydration. This means you have the benefits of a low hydration dough that is easy to work with, very stable and predictable as well as the soft, fluffy and bouncy texture of a high hydration dough.
The issue with our normal shokupan was that it always leaned a little bit towards the sweeter side and was very neutral, which worked for us - we liked to use it for french toast, crisp sandos and bostock. For the folks in Bar Pez it needed a little bit of tweaking if it was to be used for Ox Tongue sandwiches, Scallop Sesame Toast and Beef Tartar. Having used our own pastry scraps to build our dough we knew incorporating bread offcuts was an avenue we could explore with Simone and the team. So we started trials using their sourdough bread scraps as a starting point for our soaker. After a little back and forth and trying to balance the additional flavour of the sourdough we cracked it - the sourdough soaker gives the bread a more savoury note and adds an extra layer of flavour while still being neutral enough to be a great platform to allow Simone and the chefs in Bar Pez to layer flavours on.
We visited Bar Pez a little while ago and got to sample all the dishes that Simone and the team are using our loaf for and we we’re blown away. As a team of bakers it is lovely to see our bread, what we see as a very humble ingredient, elevated to such an amazingly high level by a team of extremely talented chefs.
Let us know if you’d like us to share a recipe for Shokupan so you can give it a go at home?
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