Loaf of the Month: Tomato Basil Milk Bread

imagine the BLTS, grilled cheeses, sandos, and Texas toasts in your future

Have You Eaten Yet? Here’s a new recipe from my kitchen to yours that I hope you’ll love! For more recipes, you can pre-order my next cookbook, Chinese Enough, or purchase Mooncakes and Milk Bread for all things Chinese Baking!

I get asked all the time if I ever want to open a restaurant or a bakery and my immediate answer is a hard "no”. But I’ll let you in on another dream of mine. One day I want to open a small grocery store with a cafe to the side that makes a really solid latte and Hong Kong milk tea. Maybe there’s even a small amount of food service where in the mornings you can get a little steamer of har gow or siu mai and there’s a small selection of freshly baked sourdough pork buns and tall loaves of tomato basil milk bread. I want a giant wooden table in the middle piled high with fresh gai lan, yu choy, bitter melons, loquats, and juicy summer tomatoes. The dry goods shelves are really just an extension of my pantry and I have all favorite soy sauces and chili pastes on display. Cookbooks! So many cookbooks and my friends can stop by the grocer on their book tours.

It’s essentially the asian grocery store of my dreams. When I lived in Inner Richmond in San Francisco I would walk a few blocks from my apartment to catch the 38R on Geary and pass all my favorite asian markets, good luck dim sum, green apple books, and coffee shops and dreamed about how fun it would be capture all my favorite things about this neighborhood in one adorable and efficient space. Mainly, I really wanted a place where I could buy great to-go dim sum and a coffee for breakfast before work.

This dream found it’s home in my head and heart earlier this year and it has just sort of quietly stayed there. When I’m driving around the East Bay I take notice of all the retail to rent/lease signs and for a few moments imagine what foot traffic might be like and how the Sun would filter through the windows.

Fun fact: my senior project in architecture school was a grocery store. Specifically a new model of grocery store for the future. This was in 2013 and my design was focused on a grocery store for community building and teaching people how to connect and fully utilize their food. There was a test kitchen, a coffee window that you can order from the sidewalk, a central produce display, NATURAL LIGHT, and tiny restaurants for food start ups. It’s funny, now over a decade later, how so many trendy grocery store concepts have all these same things!

Who knows when or if my new profession as a grocer will happen, but for now I’m just going to play out my fantasies by baking the tall loaves of bread I want to stalk my imaginary grocery store with.

I promise to cool it on the tomato recipes for the rest of the year. But this tomato basil milk bread is just so freaking soft and delicious and it actually utilizes tomato paste instead of fresh tomatoes… so it’s different! I was 10000% inspired by the tomato basil bread from Panera, which I haven’t had since college but I do remember being obsessed with getting a turkey sandwich on it. This tomato basil milk bread tastes faintly like pizza and makes the best BLTs and grilled cheeses. I need to make another loaf this weekend because it is just calling for me to turn thick slices of it into buttery Texas toast!

A few things to note about this milk bread:

• There’s no tongzhong. Typically I make make one with milk and flour and it helps keep the bread softer longer, but I wanted as much of the milk as possible to steep the fresh basil in.

• Olive oil instead of butter. I use them interchangeably, by weight, but I really like the flavor of olive oil in this recipe and it also gives the bread a slight crispness.

• Bake in a pullman loaf pan for a tall loaf but you also don’t have to. I love a pullman loaf pan (mine is 4x4x8 inches) for the satisfying square corners and straight edges but you can just use a regular loaf pan. It’s important to really allow the dough to truly double, even close to triple for a pullman. The dough after the first proof should be just above the top edge of the pan.

Happy Baking, friends! And have a great weekend!

Tomato Basil Milk Bread

Makes 1 loaf