This saffron spiced milk bread should be part of a bread sommelier course<\/a> in my humble opinion. It is ideal for studying flavor, aroma, texture and pairings. I recommend it with a thin layer of butter perhaps accompanying a roobois tea, or for a Singaporean-style ice cream sandwich (use vanilla ice cream to let the bread shine) or my favorite, gobbled up plain after taking photos of it. The bread is a bit spendy but so special and delicious that I think it\u2019s worth it. Between the 1\/4 tsp saffron threads and two eggs \u2014 one for the dough and one for the wash \u2014 you\u2019re looking at about $4 right there.<\/p>\n Saffron is the stigma of the crocus sativus <\/i>flower and it\u2019s mostly grown in Greece, Iran, Morocco and India. Each saffron crocus flower produces just three threads of saffron and they have to be harvested by hand. To me, saffron tastes both honeylike and woody, but it is described with numerous other adjectives: earthy, sweet, floral, grassy, and even mushroomy. While I encourage you to try the recipe with saffron, the bread will still be awesome if you skip it. The same applies to the other spices and dried fruit in the dough; I thoroughly enjoyed the test bakes with only steeped saffron. And actually you may also notice the amount of cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, raisins\/currants and candied orange peel is relatively low so as not to drown out the saffron flavor.<\/p>\n As with many milk bread recipes, this uses a tangzhong <\/em>to make the bread pillowy soft and resist staling. Wrapped in plastic or beeswax wrap, this bread will stay quite soft for a week or longer. Tangzhong<\/em> <\/strong>is the Chinese term for pre-cooking on the stove some of the flour and liquid in a bread recipe. This is done with anywhere from 4 to 10% of the total flour, and in this recipe it\u2019s 8%. The tangzhong<\/em> flour-to-liquid ratio is around 1:5. Similar to\u00a0yudane<\/a><\/em>, this process gelatinizes the starches in the dough and allows it to hold more moisture. Here are additional Breadtopia recipes<\/a> (seven to-date) that use this technique.<\/p>\n If you make the sourdough variation of this recipe, you\u2019ll build a sweet stiff levain that is quite large. This is to favor the yeast in the starter to help ferment this sweeter dough and encourage caramelization of the crust. This experiment with regular starter versus a sweet stiff starter<\/a> explains this in more detail if you\u2019re interested. Even with this special starter build, the sourdough variation still ferments quite slowly. If possible keep the dough warm, in the low 80s Fahrenheit. My first test bake with a slightly underdeveloped sweet stiff levain (not quite doubled) took 43 hours <\/strong>from mixing to oven, all at room temperature \u2014 daytime in the proofer at 80\u00b0F, nighttime out of the proofer in the mid-60s. With a more-than-doubled sweet stiff levain and the proofer set to 80\u00b0F, the next sourdough test bake took only 12 hours<\/strong> from mixing to oven.<\/p>\n Equipment: <\/strong>This dough is scaled for a small Pullman pan, which is 9x4x4 inches or it can be baked freestanding as a braided bread. I also baked one test dough in a medium USA pan 9x5x2.75 inches and this was an okay fit despite the smaller volume. Note the different bake times<\/strong> for the loaf (35-40 minutes) versus the braid (25-30 minutes).<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/breadtopia.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/20250311_141038a-Copy.jpg\")
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