How can I make sense of this coconut bread recipe?

February 17, 2009 4:29 PM

I found a recipe for delicious-looking coconut buns, but it's missing a bit of info and has distinct ESL qualities. Can anyone help me make sense of it?

The author seems to be Chinese. She's done a pretty good job writing it up, but a few parts are unclear (at least to a baking novice, like myself):

- Would you take the spoons of yeast and salt to be teaspoons or tablespoons?

- What would you take "crush it up with (unsalted, I presume) butter" to entail?

- "You can do all of the above with a toaster"... Buh?

posted by CKmtl to food & drink (6 comments total)

- Would you take the spoons of yeast and salt to be teaspoons or tablespoons?
Definitely teaspoons.

- What would you take "crush it up with (unsalted, I presume) butter" to entail?
Just knead the mixture and unsalted butter together.

- "You can do all of the above with a toaster"... Buh?
A food processor?
posted by peacheater at 4:41 PM on February 17

Since she is using 280g of flour, 1 teaspoon of yeast should be enough. Same for the salt.

Crush it up with butter means to blend butter into the dough. There's a specific name for this technique (in French) that I can't remember right now, but you just blend in small chunks of softened butter into the dough. The dough gets awfully sticky for a while, then very smooth and pliable.

I'm guessing by toaster she means bread machine.
posted by thread_makimaki at 4:49 PM on February 17

This recipe looks to me like a variation in shape on the traditional yummy Chinese bun bafflingly known as a "cocktail bun" which lots of Chinese bakeries here in SF offer. They are basically a nice rich eggy dough filled with a paste of grated coconut, sugar and some kind of shortening/butter (and yellow food coloring). They're shaped like hot dog buns, not coiled like hers, but I'd bet hers are a riff on the traditional treats.

Here is a recipe for cocktail buns which I've never tried, but it seems pretty reasonable. You could probably use it as a guide to fill in the missing information in your recipe.

Anybody know why they're called cocktail buns?
posted by Quietgal at 5:01 PM on February 17

ok...re-reading the recipe, a few important steps are not clear. So here's my interpretation of her recipe.

1.Heat 150ml of milk. Let it cool down to lukewarm (it should feel just a bit warm if you dip in a finger, not hot, or you may prematurely kill the yeast). Mix in 1 teaspoon of dry yeast and 40g of sugar.
2.Mix together 280g of all purpose flour [since she says she ran out of bread flour], 1 teaspoon of salt, and 1 beaten egg. (Note: personally I'd mix the flour and salt (dry ingredients), and egg and milk (wet), then combine.)
3.Combine all of the above. Knead to form a dough.
4. Blend in 40g of softened butter into the dough in small pieces, kneading well until you have a smooth, pliable dough. (Of course you could do all of the steps up to this point with a bread machine.)
5. Make a smooth ball with the dough. Put into a lightly buttered or greased bowl, cover with cling film (plastic wrap) and leave in a warm place until it has doubled in bulk, about 45 minutes to an hour depending on your conditions (warmth of room, strength of yeast, etc).
6. Then we prepare the stuffing. Mix equal amounts (she doesn't say by weight or volume so you'll have to experiment here) of shredded coconut, sugar and butter to form a stiff paste.
7. Punch down the risen dough and roll out into a long snake. Cut into 10 equal pieces, and round off the pieces. Cover with a moist towel and let rest for about 10 minutes to heal the dough. Flatten out each piece, and fill with a bit of the coconut paste. (She seems to make sort of schnecken like pieces with them, which means you need to make little snakes of each piece of dough, flatten them out and fill with a thin snake of the coconut paste.)
8. Form the dough into a beautiful snail-like shape by coiling it around.
9. Put the formed pieces onto a baking sheet lined with non-stick liner or kitchen parchment paper. Cover with a moistened and wrung out towel. Leave in a warm place, such as a gas oven with the pilot light on. (If you're using an electric oven, you can switch it on briefly, then turn it off and keep the oven door closed.) The temperature should be around 40 degrees C. or 100 degrees F.
10. After about 40 minutes the buns will have doubled in bulk. If you had them in the oven, take them out and switch on your oven to 180 degrees C / 355 deg F.
11. Brush the surface of the buns with a beaten egg, using a pastry brush.
12. Bake for 18 minutes at 180 degrees C / 355 degrees F, or until golden brown.
posted by thread_makimaki at 5:07 PM on February 17 [3 favorites has favorites]

thread_makimaki notes the milk should be lukewarm -- if you're looking for a specific temperature, yeast starts to die at about 120 F/ 49 C, and I'm usually paranoid about this so I will measure the temperature of a warmed liquid before adding yeast to it. Also if you use instant yeast instead of "active dry" yeast you can just add the yeast to the dry ingredients and then add the milk/sugar mixture.
posted by sararah at 5:58 PM on February 17

Quietgal: That's exactly what I had been looking for. For some reason, the Chinese store that I go to calls their buns simply "coconut bread" (or "coconut stick" if it's baked as a twisty mini baguette). Maybe it's to make the French labeling easier.

thread_makimaki: That's awesome. So the butter part is probably like making a brioche dough?

'Toaster' as a bread machine does make the most sense. Perhaps she got stuck on the word and asked someone for the name of "that machine that you put bread in to cook it".
posted by CKmtl at 7:32 PM on February 18