Milk bread (p. 597)

Rachel and I thought we would make coffee cake for breakfast. In the morning, while trying to force myself out of bed extremely early after a late night, I kept thinking "maybe we don't need bread" while simultaneously knowing that Rachel was likely being responsible and getting the yeast started (which she was). Thank goodness for responsible friends. Most of the coffee cakes start with the dough for Milk bread (p. 597).

Warm milk, butter, sugar, an egg, and a little salt were added to the yeast and it was mixed by hand for about one minute. Two cups of flour were stirred in and an additional two cups of flour were kneaded in until the dough was smooth and elastic:



We set it out to raise until doubled in size. At this point we looked at the coffee cake recipes--apparently you are supposed to use a heckava lot more sugar if you are making a coffee cake. Whoops! It was way too late to add more sugar so we decided to just finish making the milk bread and formed the dough in to a loaf. It sat until it doubled in size again:



And was popped in to the oven:



I thought this bread was awful. It was heavy (it's possible the house was too cold or we didn't let it raise enough) and it had an off flavor that I really disliked. I think it might have been all of the milk. I can't see myself ever making this bread again. Has anyone else made this recipe? Did it turn out the same way?

Thank you Rachel and Jon for all the support! That was a particularly fun couple days of TJOC cooking and it's just going to get more interesting since we've cooked all the obvious recipes!