Skip to content

Recipes with bread flour

3 recipes that use bread flour, with photos, step-by-step instructions and cook times. The quickest, Nagasaki castella, takes 75 minutes. It is most often cooked with milk, caster sugar and aniseed.

Got a few things in the fridge? Search by everything you have

EnsaymadaSweet cheese brioche

Filipino bakeries took the coiled Mallorcan ensaïmada and made it richer and softer: an egg-yolk brioche rolled with butter into a snail, baked pale gold, then spread with more butter, dusted with sugar and heaped with finely grated cheese. Boxes of them are carried to Christmas visits and town fiestas, and a single one with hot tsokolate makes a proper merienda. The salty cheese against the sweet crumb is the whole point. Chef's tip: the dough must be sticky and soft when you knead it; adding flour until it is easy to handle gives you dry, bready buns instead of feather-light ones.

by KrazyBadal 0 views

MosbolletjiesAniseed grape buns

Each harvest, wine farms around Paarl and the Boland once used foaming fresh grape must to raise these sweet, tear-apart buns, and some families still bake them every January and dry what is left into rusks for coffee dunking. This home method replaces the must with a starter of pure grape juice, raisins and a little yeast, bubbled overnight; the tiny trace of alcohol the fermentation makes bakes off in the oven. The buns are soft and feathery, gently sweet, scented with aniseed and glazed with a sticky sugar wash. Rushing is the mistake: this dough rises slowly overnight and needs to double properly at each stage, or the buns turn out dense. Chef's tip: use juice with no added preservatives, which stop the starter from fermenting.

by KrazyBadal 0 views

Nagasaki castellaHoney sponge cake

Castella arrived in Nagasaki with Portuguese traders in the 16th century, when the port was Japan's only window to Europe, and the name probably comes from 'pão de Castela', bread from Castile. Over 400 years Nagasaki's bakers turned it into something their own: a tall, fine-crumbed sponge made only of eggs, sugar, flour and honey, with a dark, sticky top and a layer of crunchy zarame sugar crystals at the bottom. It's still sold in long wooden boxes at old shops near the harbour and given as a formal gift. Cut it into neat slices and serve with green tea. Chef's tip: wrap the cake in cling film while still warm and rest it overnight. Its moist, springy texture develops as it rests.

by KrazyBadal 0 views

Goes well with bread flour