Panda bread! The stuff happiness is made of.

I really thought about putting off making that panda bread till the week-end but then decided that if I steamed it, I could totally make a tiny panda bread just for myself. And so after a few hours I had panda bread! Pandas in Galiland sometimes have misplaced ears and stuff, that’s normal.

How did I make that panda bread?

I did that thing that most grandmas do and everyone hates, I kind of looked at photos, kind of thought about it and went on to make my version of panda bread without taking into account the given recipe. But if you’re not too familiar with bread making, you might want to check out the recipe or at least jot down the repartitions of the white/brown/green parts.

Also what the heck is “green tea powder”? Never heard of it.

Okie kids, if you want a proper recipe, go to this site, if you like experimenting with food, you can try to follow my lead a bit.

Super duper recipe for making steamed panda bread – Gali’s way
Make a basic bread dough with regular flour*, yeast**, a bit of milk, a bit of oil, a bit of sugar and some fleur d’oranger***. Work the dough up until it has the right consistency and your arms are killing you.

If you have access to “green tea powder”, use that. If not, I used ground up oolong tea (to my horror I discovered that I do not have proper green tea, I do have jasmine green tea, I have all kinds of other green teas but no simple green tea).

Mix the ground tea bits into the dough. Mix the cocoa powder into the dough.

Eventually say screw it and go look for some green food colouring which expired in 2008. It still works! Not pictured – my hands… damn that stuff is strong, my nails suffered quite a bit.

Cut up the different coloured dough into parts as explained in the recipe I linked above.

Put everything together. This was the size of my fist (or even smaller actually) so it wasn’t hard to put together. If you’re making a whole loaf, I think you’d really need to use one of those bread loaf pans to keep everything nice and in shape.

Strong with my new fresh bread/bun steaming knowledge from my mantou experiments, I prepared a cozy little rising environment and left it to rise for about an hour. Yes, I don’t do several rounds of proofing when it comes to some breads, sue me, I don’t use enough yeast to need to lose the yeasty taste.

Fresh out of the steamer!

And voila! As I had predicted in the mantou experiments, adding milk does give it a pain au lait texture! Next time I’m replacing the oil with butter and then I’ll be sure to get a perfect pain au lait.

One of the ears moved a bit during the rising/steaming, so if you’re going for a loaf, make sure that everything is tight and if possible use a tall bread pan!

So there… if you have any questions, reflections, tips, etc. feel free to share!

* regular flour – the cheap stuff from the store. The original recipe calls for bread and cake flours, I do not have such things in my house. I mean, the T55 or whatever the regular flour is, that will do.
** we’ve had this discussion in my post about mantou, use whatever yeast you’re comfortable with – that’s my best advice when working with breads.
*** I did not measure my ingredients, the first step to becoming a cooking grandma that everyone hates is to stop measuring ingredients. Or maybe that’s the second, the first one would be to completely disregard ingredient lists.