Danish Bread

Since I'm on special diet since beginning of the year I have limited myself to baking. You can probably see that I have tried out a lot of gluten free bread here. But now I'm on an even stricter diet which limits a lot of items so I figure out, let's concentrate more on health. All these treats will come later.

But poor hubby has also limit on baking items. For his birthday I baked him a chocolate castella cake. He requested chocolate cake and I found a simple recipe for chocolate sponge cake and it turned out okay. I learned that I should not take it out too soon. But anyhow, the recipe I used was from Josephine's Recipe - see the link here.

I'm not going to post the photo of the chocolate cake here because it wasn't too pretty. Taste wise was pretty good but just like with chiffon cake, it shrunk a lot after I took it out of oven. 😕

So I thought just because I couldn't eat doesn't mean I can't bake. I just needed to make it a smaller size one - just for hubby's consumption.

I chose Danish bread because I sort of missing it. 😅 Well, there are tons of items that I haven't been able to eat since December 2020. So sad. But Danish bread reminded me of our trip to Nagoya a couple of years back. It was served at a coffee shop with some soft serve vanilla ice cream and cherry to complete it. 

The recipe I used was from YouTuber Gourmet Apron 416. The recipe below has been slightly adapted to my needs.

Ingredients :

200 g bread flour

1 tablespoon (tbs) white sugar

100 ml warm water

40 ml milk

scant salt

< 1/2 teaspoon active dry yeast

90 gr butter - leave out for a little while to soften and then slice thinly.

1 egg yolk for egg wash

Preparation :

The butter sheet can be prepared a day earlier. Basically 90 gr of butter has to be transformed into a flatten sheet of butter about 3inch by 3 inch. Prepare a sheet of parchment paper and arrange the sliced butter on it. Wrap up the butter and flatten the butter up using a rolling pin. Careful not to break the paper. I found that letting the butter slightly warm up a bit was easier to shape. 

After the butter has flatten to a sheet. Wrap it up using the parchment paper and keep it in the fridge to be used with the dough when time comes.

Proof the yeast by mixing 1 tb sugar with yeast and warm water. Leave it aside for about ten minutes.

Mix the proofed yeast mixture with milk, flour, salt. Knead until the dough is smooth and elastic. I actually used about another 1 tbs of butter since it felt a bit dry.

Cover the dough up and let it rise until double. 

Then take the dough out and flatten it. Using a rolling pin, shape the dough into a rectangular about 6-7inch by 6-7 inch. You want to make sure that the dough is big enough to cover the butter sheet.

Once the shape has been reached, arrange the butter sheet in the middle and fold the dough to cover the butter sheet. Overlapping a bit is fine. Pinch the dough to close it. Careful to press out any air as to not create a bubble later on.

Use the rolling pin and flatten out the dough about 6inch by 6 inch. It doesn't have to be too exact. Use a plastic wrap cover up the dough and refrigerate for about 20 minutes. What I did was just using the shrink wrap and make sure it's air tight against my big chopping board that I used as base. Then I put the whole chopping board in the fridge. 😀

After 20 minutes, take it out and fold the dough the other direction. Make sure to fold the first fold in so both sides of dough are not smooth. Again, using the rolling pin, flatten the dough and roll it out about 6in x 6 in again. Then cover with the shrink wrap and drop it in the fridge again.

Repeat the process once more. Then roll out the dough to about 4in x 8in. Use a cutter and cut the dough into 4 long dough - 1inch wide. Now you have 4 long dough the size of 1in x 8 in. Put 2 dough on top of each other and arranged them in the round pan with diameter of 3.5 inch.

Let the dough rise to double the size. Preheat oven to 340℉. Before popping it in the oven, brush the top of the bread with egg yolk. Bake for about 22 minutes. Then increase the heat to 375℉ and bake another 5 minutes.

The end product will be a golden color bread with layers very similar to croissant.

Hubby enjoyed this bread. He finished half of it on the first seating. Well, it tastes best on first day right ? The outer layer was crispy and soft inside. On second day the crispiness wasn't there anymore. We could probably make it crispy by putting it in the oven again. But it was still tasty.

Since it only had 1 tbs of sugar, it wasn't sweet. So he ate it with nutella and also his favorite jam.