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This is my dish for the 2026 Potluck hosted by Skep and Myrtletribe!

It's a bit hard here to make my preamble pithy, but I chose this recipe (based on Model Bakery's pain de mie) for the potluck because it does have a lovely golden hue, but also is one of my daughter's safe foods. I make it pretty often nowadays and just started experimenting with tripling the batch and using the mixer instead of the dough setting on the bread machine. It's funny, because this change reconnects me to the stages of bread. With the bread machine, you dump all the ingredients, set it to dough, let it finish, before one swoops in to manually shape, rise, and bake. Because that is so easy, I want to document that version, and update this later with notes on the process for mixer/hand kneading. The pullman pan makes this bread a perfect rectangle with perfectly square slices and a very tight crumb. I often call it "savory pound cake" because of that quality.

Ingredients

• 150g water
• 75g milk
• 2 eggs
• 42g butter
• 560g bread flour
• 16g sugar
• 10g salt
• 4g instant yeast

Instructions

1. Add all the dough ingredients to bread machine in the order recommended by the manufacturer (the ingredient list reflects the order on my model).
2. Set on dough cycle and Start.
3. After the Dough cycle is complete, shape the dough into a loaf. This can be done by gently patting and stretching it into a rectagle and rolling that rectangle into a log. Seal all seams by pinching them and gently rolling the dough. and put in a lightly greased 9 x 4 x 4 pullman pan. Cover with lid. Reference to shaping.
4. Rise dough until it reaches 1-inch from the top of the baking pan. This can take from 20 minutes to 1½ hours depending on the room temperature and how much the dough deflated during shaping. Start preheating the oven to 350°F halfway through the rise.
5. Bake for 45 minutes.
6. Remove bread from the pan and let it cool on a rack for at least 2 hours before slicing (I know the agony of smelling fresh bread and wanting to dive in but the 2 hour wait is worth it as the bread needs that time to finalize its chemical reaction stuff)
7. Slices can be frozen and defrosted individually.

Note

The original recipe had a quick poolish which I do often use to help get a touch nicer flavor. If you want to go the poolish route, mix 75 gr of the water and 50 gr of the flour in a pint jar or small bowl with 1/8 tsp intant yeast. Let sit for about 1½ hours. The poolish should be loose and very bubbly when ready. Use all of it when adding the wet ingredients. Just rememember to deduct the amount of flour and water used for the poolish from the final dough.

I also sometimes use some of my unfed sourdough starter. In that case, I add 125 gr starter to the wet ingredients, and deduct the amount of flour and water in that starter (for example, Vincent van Dough is now fed at 65% hydration at a 1:4:2.6 ratio which is 25 gr starter, 100 gr flour, and 65 gr water. So in this recipe, I scale water back to 100 gr, and flour to 485 gr). I feel these types of expirements are more fun in time because once you understand how the dough responds to your kitchen and weather, you can feel more confident about knowing if these tweaks are making the same type of dough, and when you need to make small adjustments during mixing.