Ube Shokupan (Purple Sweet Potato Milk Bread) with Black Sesame
For me, spooky season means you get to play with your food. This bread was inspired by one of my favourite pandemic treats, the Gayuma Secret Menu Club. A Filipino/Asian-fusion cuisine, Jinny and Katrina introduced me to the flavour and colour of ube, purple sweet potato. Gayuma partnered with Sugbo to feature many amazing treats made with ube (the ube cake is particularly memorable).
This bread is violently purple from added ube powder, with a black sesame crust for extra spookiness (the sesame is optional).
The base recipe is Shokupan, an enriched Japanese milk bread that is so good you’re going to need to share it just to stop eating it. Tangzhong, a roux-like substance gives the bread tremendous lift. Using a pullman loaf pan with a lid gives you a very spooky finished product – square bread.
Ingredients
This recipe has a very specific volume to create a square loaf in a lidded 9x4x4 pan. If that’s your goal please use a scale.
Tangzhong
45g all purpose flour
120ml whole milk
Dough
275g bread flour
50g ube powder (buy online)
60g sugar
7g active dry yeast (1 packet)
4g salt
15g lemon juice
1 egg (50g)
120ml warm whole milk
Tangzhong
60 grams unsalted butter, cut into pieces and softened at room temperature
Shaping
15g butter
75g black sesame seeds
Special equipment
9x4x4 Pullman-style loaf pan with lid (if you want a square loaf – buy online), otherwise any loaf pan
For the13x4x4 pan (buy online) multiply the recipe by 1.45
Stand mixer (optional)
Bench scraper (buy online)
Notes
You can use different powdered ingredients to get different colours. These work in the same quantity.
For an acid green and grassy-sweet flavour, try pandan powder (buy online)
For a baby blue try butterfly pea flower powder (buy online)
I would recommend only using ube powder. The “ube extracts” you can find are typically made of corn syrup/glucose, food dye, and “flavour” (whatever that is). Always read the ingredients!
You can rarely find fresh ube at Asian supermarkets, and sometimes in the freezer section. You’ll have to steam-cook it, cool it, mash it, and incorporate it into the dough. I haven’t been able to test this myself – despite living near both a Chinese and a Thai supermarket – so I can’t speak to the volume required.
Method
Make the tangzhong
In a small saucepan, whisk together the flour and milk on medium heat
Cook until a digital thermometer reads 150°F (140-175°F is fine), about 3 minutes – don’t overcook
Set aside to cool down
Make the dough in a stand mixer
In the bowl of a stand mixer, add the flour, uber powder, warm milk, sugar, salt, yeast, tangzhong, and lemon juice
Mix with the dough hook attachment for 4 minutes – it’s important to develop a good amount of gluten at this stage before adding in the butter, since butter will inhibit gluten development
With the mixer running, add the butter 1 piece at a time. Wait until each piece of butter is fully absorbed before adding the next piece. The entire process will take around 8 minutes.
Make the dough by hand
In a large bowl, add the flour, ube powder, sugar, and salt. Mix to combine. This helps mix the ube powder in more consistently as it can form clumps when doing this by hand.
Add the warm milk, sugar, salt, yeast, tangzhong, and lemon juice
Mix with a wooden spoon until combined, then turn onto the counter and knead for 4-6 minutes until you have a soft dough
You can add the butter one piece at a time or all at once; I usually do it all at once and suffer through the first minute being a slippery mess. After the dough comes back together, knead for an additional 8-10 minutes until you have a very soft dough.
First rise
Cover the dough and let rest for 1 hour in a dough proofer, 4 hours at room temperature, or overnight in the fridge to develop flavour. The dough will double in size.
Second rise
Punch down the dough to remove air and slightly knead, this helps redistribute the flour and yeast, and remove any very large air bubbles.
Shape into a ball and allow to rise at room temperature, covered, for about an hour
Shaping and third rise
Butter the sides of a 9x4x4 pullman loaf pan with lid, if you don’t have one you can use any size of bread loaf pan
Have a plate or 9x13 pan with black sesame at the ready
Sometimes milk bread is shaped into several small spirals to allow it to develop a 4x rise in the oven. Because this bread is coated in black sesame, and I’m baking it with the bread pan lid for a square loaf, I find it’s a better result to shape as one single loaf so you don’t get pockets of sesame seed in the middle of the loaf.
On a lightly floured surface, use a rolling pin or your hands to roll the dough out to a 9x9 square. Try to be as even in thickness as possible.
Tightly roll the the dough into a spiral, brushing off any excess flour as you go.
Roll the dough in the black sesame, the dough can be quite sticky so the sesame should stick. If you have any issues here, you can wet your hands and pat around the dough, then dry your hands before rolling the dough in sesame seeds; you can skip this step, but the outside of the bread will become golden brown which isn’t as spooky.
Place the dough into your prepared loaf pan
Cover the dough and let it rise until it reaches just below the very top of the loaf pan; 1 hour if you’re using a proofing box, up to 4 hours at room temperature. Follow the dough, not my schedule.
Bake
Once your dough is 2/3 up the pan, pre-heat your oven to 375°F
Cover the loaf pan with the metal lid, if using
Place the dough into the pre-heated oven
Bake for 40 minutes. Normally I would “tap” bread to see if it’s done – but this is baked in a pan. Enriched bread should be cooked to an internal temperature of 205°F so I recommend checking with a digital thermometer if you have one. Underbaked bread may collapse as it cools, overbaked bread will be dry.
Cool
Remove from the loaf pan immediately – if it doesn’t slide out easily, use an offset spatula or butter knife to ease it out of the pan. Removing the bread immediately will help you get a thinner, softer crust by giving any excess steam a place to escape.
Cool fully on a wire rack. I know it smells amazing and it’s tempting to take a video with steam pouring out to post on Instagram – and if you’re going to eat the entire loaf of bread right then you can do that. But when you go back to that bread in an hour the inside will be gummy, the crust will be thick and hard, and you’re going to be sad. Let it cool before you cut it.
Serve
You can eat this bread as is, it’s perfect
It' makes amazing croutons for pumpkin soup
Turn it into French toast
If you want to make a spooky lunch for the kids and adults in your life, may I suggest a spooky Shokupan Pizza (which I learned about in Ken Forkish’s new book).
Troubleshooting
This bread was under-proofed, I was rushing to get to bed.
This bread was perfectly proofed, I was patient.
The bread collapsed while cooling
If your bread collapses after cooling, there could be a few causes:
You need to ensure it’s fully proofed before baking – it should rise all the way to the top of the tin.
You need to remove it from the pan immediately after taking it out of the oven to allow the steam to escape. If the steam builds up as the bread cools you’ll get a wrinkly surface.
The sesame won’t stick
Lightly wet your hands and pat the dough before rolling in the sesame seeds.