I made a double batch because there was enough tangzhong to do so and because I wanted to test how the bread 'kept'. Also, I cut back on the amt. of sugar when I made the bread. The tangzhong definitely helps in keeping the bread fresh longer. Mine is still relatively soft over 24 hrs. after baking which impresses me enough to try adapting this technique to some of my other bread recipes. My loaves had a very nice crispy crust fresh out of the oven. Note that I'm baking in a toaster oven and the top of the loaves were very close to the top of the oven. Maybe it's just me (or the flour I used--Pillsbury Bread flour, but I thought the bread was lacking a bit in flavor. OR, since the recipe doesn't call for any salt & I didn't add any, perhaps that's part of the problem...salt helps to rein in the action of yeast and I noticed that the dough was really spunky and rose quite fast. No doubt, retarding the rise would help a lot to develop flavor. Nice crumb but the bread has a little different 'mouth feel'. Kinda' weird but not necessarily disagreeable. Agree that it would make great rolls which is what I'll likely do with the recipe next time, along w/ a bit of salt & at least an overnight ferment in the refrigerator to help develop more flavor. All in all, the recipe is worth trying. Thank you for sharing it with us, Pat.

Lars -- I have two Pullman pans and I used any number of enriched bread recipes in them as long as I weighed the amount of dough I put in the pans to equal the amount suitable for each loaf. The small pan I have is designed to make about a 1-pound loaf (a recipe calling for about 3-3-1/4 c. of flour) and the large Pullman pan is designed to make about a 2-pound loaf (or a recipe calling for about 4-5 cups of flour), so follow the amount of flour and weight of the dough, and you should be fine. The bread made in a Pullman pan is intended to have a very close-grained texture so you can easily slice it into thin slices, so enriching ingredients like milk and butter work well. Recipes that include potato or potato water will also work in a Pullman pan if you want to reduce the amount of milk. I even used 100% white whole wheat flour breads in them. By baking 100% whole wheat bread in a Pullman pan, the loaf is not very dark due to using white wheat flour, and the shape of the loaf was a way to "trick" people into not realizing it was a loaf of homemade bread. And yes, there are people who think homemade bread is "icky". I often made a large Pullman pan loaf when we had weekend guests. I went many years without purchasing commercial loaves of bread thanks to my Pullman pans. I wouldn't increase the amount of yeast just because you are using whole wheat flour. Don't go by the amount of time the loaf needs to rise before placing the lid on it in the recipe, set a timer for 10-minutes or so less than the time suggested for placing the lid on and check the dough at that time to see when it reaches just below the lip of the pan. Dough will raise according to the moisture in the loaf, the age of the yeast, and the ambient temperature and moisture level - it can't tell time - EVER! You really need to stay on top of this time in the developing loaf - so check early and often, especially if you add more yeast. And be sure to initially form a flat dough log so it will eventually fill the pan nicely as a flat, not domed, loaf. King Arthur TIP: If you make a point to remember which way the lid slides on and off before you put the pan in the oven, you'll save yourself some aggravation of tugging the hot lid the wrong way when it's ready to come off). Hope that helps you out.... :-) -Grainlady

I made pain de mie yesterday and decided that since it is almost square, I would cut sandwiches into triangles.The sandwich on the left (with pickles) is for my brother, and the one with tomato is mine. He doesn't like tomatoes, and I didn't want pickles on mine, since I used Bleu cheese dressing that I had made instead of mayo, as I had used the last of the mayo to make the dressing. When I went to the store on Tuesday, they were out of mayo, and I did not want to make my own, since we are going back to Cathedral City tomorrow. I will take the bread with me, although I was slightly disappointed in it, partly because I could not find whole wheat flour Tuesday and therefore had to make white bread. When I made the bread, the dough rose quite a bit more than usual, as I generally make it with whole wheat or rye flour, and so I had to push the dough down to get the top of the Pullman loaf pan to close. The bread came out a bit denser than I like for white bread, but it is easy to slice very thinly. I did have to trim the crusts before toasting the bread for the sandwiches because the bread came out with thick, tough crusts, even though I buttered them when it came out of the oven. I will definitely try to go back to whole wheat pan de mie in the future, but if I have to make white bread, I might reduce the recipe a bit. I will not be taking my Pullman pan to CC, however. I might decide I like the dense white bread for sandwiches, but I cannot tell yet. It is certainly easier to cut into triangles, but I really do not like eating triangular sandwiches. The square sliced Swiss cheese does fit better on this bread, but normally I use round sliced Provolone on sandwiches. I use Swiss cheese mostly for Reuben sandwiches, and those require rye bread and sauerkraut, and I always have sauerkraut.

It is easy to understand why weighing some things is more precise. And, being precise to that degree would be important in a commercial bakery where you need a consistent product. At home it is fine if the bread is different in the summer from in the winter or comes out a bit different from the last loaves. It is all good and sometimes leads to more ways to use it because it did or didn't do what you expected it to do. But people have been baking breads for thousands of years without a carefully calibrated scale. It is pretty much a home art. I don't dismiss the value of having a scale in the kitchen. Weighing things is so much more precise and there are some times when that precision really makes a difference. It is a valuable tool to have in some cases, but it is not at all necessary to bake bread. Heck, I hardly even measure anymore. I have been at it for a long time. I keep it in the ball park, most of the time. When I produce a mutant loaf, I find a creative way to use it and that has lead to some pretty darned good serendipity . For my kitchen, bread is not just an end product. Often it is used as an element in the producing of something else. Last evening I had a small bag of pieces of crust and bits of leftover bread. I put some butter/olive oil in the skillet, put in a bit of chopped onion to brown up and them put the odds and ends bread pieces into the hot skillet and let is brown slowly, added a bit of salt and we had them as a sort of large croutons in our SquashSquashCorn soup. (my own invention) I rarely ever throw out bread or bits of bread. There are so many uses for them! Even for those mutant loaves.