Matthew Woolen is a master pastry chef and has worked in a variety of Seattle restaurants, including gastropub Old Sage, Zhu Dang, and a gluten-free restaurant called Capitol Cider.

Matthew Woolen

A good sandwich starts with good bread. A killer sandwich starts out with great bread. These milk bread sandwich rolls are great for all kinds of sandwiches: egg salad, tuna salad, <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/wicked-good-pulled-pork-shoulder">pulled pork</a>, pulled <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/seitan-chikken">seitan chicken</a>, a <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/homemade-mcrib">homemade McRib</a>, or even a leveled-up, slapped-together sandwich made with cold cuts from the store. They’re beautifully soft through and through, from the blond crust to the tender crumb.To create that wispy and fluffy crumb, we use an enriched dough, which means that in addition to salt, water, yeast, and flour, we incorporate milk, butter, eggs, and sugar into the dough. This is standard practice for milk breads of all kinds—pain au lait, Wonder Bread, Hokkaido milk bread, you get the idea. However, we also use a variation on the tangzhong method of mixing pre-gelatinized starches into the dough, which allows the bread to hold onto more liquid, slowing down starch retrogradation. That’s just another way of saying these rolls resist <a href="starch-retrogradation-and-the-science-of-staling">staling</a>, and they have a longer-than-expected shelf life.Instead of pre-gelatinizing starches in wheat flour, we use sweet rice flour. The higher proportion of amylopectin starch molecules in rice flour means that the pre-gelatinized starch mixture is even more effective at slowing starch retrogradation, and these rolls will stay soft and won’t dry out for days.

Milk Bread Sandwich Rolls