Anyone got a recipe for a nice sub sandwich bread you’d get at an Italian deli??

This is it. We're making Japanese Milk Bread today. If you've never worked with tangzhong before, today's the day you learn why this technique changes everything. We cook a small portion of flour and milk into a paste before it goes into the dough. That paste traps moisture and keeps this bread impossibly soft for days. It's the reason Japanese bakery bread feels like a cloud and your regular sandwich loaf doesn't. This dough is enriched: butter, eggs, milk, sugar. It's going to feel different from lean doughs. Softer. Stickier. Richer. Don't panic and don't add extra flour. Trust the process. The stand mixer does the heavy lifting here, and the dough will come together. 📱 Recipe Pantry Tip: At the top of every recipe page, look for the little chef's hat icon on the right side of the nav bar. Click it. That keeps your screen awake so you're not tapping your phone with floury elbows. The crescent moon next to it toggles dark mode if your kitchen is bright. 🔗 The Recipe: https://pantry.bakinggreatbread.com/recipes/japanese-milk-bread?variant=yeasted Before you start: - Take your butter, eggs, and milk out of the fridge NOW. Room temperature ingredients matter today. - Make your tangzhong first. It needs to cool before it goes into the dough. If you made it last night, even better. - Clear your counter. You'll need space for shaping. Post your questions, your progress photos, your tangzhong shots, your shaped loaves, your finished bread. Everything goes here so we can all learn from each other. I'm here all day, start to finish. Whether you're mixing right now or pulling your loaf out tonight, this thread stays open. Let's see those milk breads. 👇

Hey Crust & Crumb bakers, Rachel Parker is back with a new episode of Breaking Bread — and this time, she's taking us somewhere we didn't expect to go. Salem, Massachusetts. 1692. You know the story. The fits. The accusations. The trials. The executions. One of the darkest chapters in American history. But what if the answer wasn't witchcraft, mass hysteria, or village politics? What if it was the bread? 🎙️ Episode 2: The Fungus That Cursed a Village — Bread, Madness, and the Salem Witch Trials In this episode, Rachel digs into the genuinely unsettling theory that a fungus called ergot — growing silently on contaminated rye crops — may have triggered the hallucinations, convulsions, and visions that started the whole terrifying chain of events. A fungus so chemically similar to LSD that the symptoms of eating it read almost word for word like the testimony of the afflicted girls in Salem. A cold, wet winter. Marshy rye fields. A village with no idea what was in their flour. And then — when the grain ran out — the devil disappeared. This episode covers: 🌾 What ergot is and how it gets into your bread without anyone knowing 😱 The symptoms of ergot poisoning — and why they match the Salem testimony so closely 🗺️ The geography of the outbreak and what it tells us ⚖️ Why not everyone agrees with the theory — and why that makes it even more interesting 🍞 What it means for us as bakers who love and trust our rye This is the kind of story that makes you look at your rye flour a little differently. Give it a listen and come back here with your thoughts. Do you think the ergot theory holds up? Have you ever felt like there's something wild and ancient in rye that the other grains don't quite have? Drop it in the comments. This one is going to spark a conversation. 👉 Listen now — link in the comments below. — Henry

Considering I broke the butter these sourdough croissants are wonderful!

Last week you made Japanese Milk Bread. The week before that, cinnamon rolls. Both of those bakes taught you something specific: how to handle enriched dough. How butter, eggs, and milk change everything about how dough feels, how it ferments, and how it bakes. This week, we’re putting all of that to work. We’re making Star Bread. If you’ve never seen one, picture this: a soft, buttery, filled bread shaped into a beautiful twisted star pattern that looks like it came out of a professional bakery. It’s the kind of bread people set in the center of a table and just stare at before they tear into it. Here’s the thing. It looks complicated. It’s not. If you made milk bread last week, you already have the hands for this. The dough is familiar. The technique is new, but I’ll walk you through every fold, every cut, every twist. Here’s how the week breaks down: https://pantry.bakinggreatbread.com/recipes/henrys-savory-star-bread?utm_source=skool&utm_medium=community&utm_campaign=recipe-share Tuesday - We talk about laminating fillings into enriched dough. What works, what doesn’t, and why your filling choice matters more than you think. Wednesday - The geometry of star bread. I’ll break down the shaping method so it makes sense before you ever touch dough. Circles, stacking, cutting, twisting. We’ll cover it all. Thursday - Filling options and flavor combinations. Sweet, savory, and a few you haven’t thought of yet. Friday - Prep day. Get your dough made, your filling ready, and your workspace set. We go live Saturday morning. Saturday - Bake-along. You know the drill. I’m here all day. Yeasted and sourdough versions will both be available on the Recipe Pantry. A few weeks ago, some of you had never made enriched dough. Now you’ve done cinnamon rolls and milk bread. Star bread is the next step, and it’s the one that’s going to make people ask “you made that?” when they see it on your counter.