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

To make the fluffiest, softest white bread with the wispiest crumb, perfect for sandwiches and oversized slabs of buttery toast, you have to pre-gelatinize some starch.Pre-gelatinizing the starches in a portion of the flour in a dough recipe increases the amount of water you can incorporate into the dough. This affects dough handling—it’s easier!—and will increase its rise; all that water turns to steam as the bread bakes, yielding an airy, fluffy crumb. It also means that your bread will stay fresh for longer, as it stalls the <a href="starch-retrogradation-and-the-science-of-staling">staling process</a>.The method we use here for pre-gelatinizing some of the starch in the dough is borrowed from the tangzhong method, in which a small amount of flour is mixed cold with a relatively large amount of liquid, and the mixture is then heated. Instead of using flour, however, I choose to use sweet rice flour. Milled from short-grain white rice, sweet rice flour has more amylopectin than wheat or other forms of starch, and that higher proportion means, once gelatinized, it can hold even more water than other sources of starch, which in turn produces a softer crumb.Finally, adding milk (in this case, milk powder) to the dough adds dairy fat and lactose, which boost the “milky” and sweet flavor of the bread, improve <a href="mastering-the-maillard-reaction">Maillard browning</a> in the crust, and make the dough more supple and easier to handle. Our recipe offers you the option of using whole milk powder and doubling the amount to produce an even milkier (and tastier!) loaf.

Shokupan (Japanese Milk Bread)