Food, Home & Lifestyle
Pain de Mie
Lesson time 22:04 min
Pain de mie literally translates to “bread of crumb.” With this first yeast-based recipe, Apollonia demonstrates how using a delicate hand results in a loaf with an irresistible, cloud-like texture.
Students give MasterClass an average rating of 4.7 out of 5 stars
Topics include: Shaping & Second Rise · Baking & Slicing
Teaches Bread Baking
Poilâne CEO Apollonia Poilâne teaches the renowned Parisian bakery’s philosophy and time-tested techniques for baking rustic French breads.
Sign UpPreview
[MUSIC PLAYING] WOMAN: In this chapter, we're going to make pain de mie. Pain de mie can translate as a bread of crumb. The French words are very evocative of the qualities of this bread. It's a bread for which the crumb is more important than the crust. The bread we'll produce in this recipe will have a thin crust, and a dense dough. It will have a few little air pockets, but they will be so well spread out, and the crumb will be so dense, that you will practically not see them. So in this loaf, we are not using our sourdough starter, because we do not want to have the tang. This is a bread that's designed to have a lot of softness to it, and the sourdough is almost too flavorful. We want it to be very soft, very round, very "cushion-y." Think about eating through a slice of it as if you were to buy through, say, a cloud, or something very cottony, very smooth. This is an easy recipe to pull off with your children, because it doesn't require a sourdough starter. It also is much more resilient. It's an easy recipe to start with, and to start building confidence in your ability to bake bread. Now, it does get trickier as you bake it, but we'll get into it. So for this recipe, we have two types of flour, sugar, instant yeast that will activate with a little bit of water, salt, black pepper, warm milk, and water. And we also have butter. This recipe calls for some butter as a way to really make it a soft bread. So in this recipe, I'm going to use bread flour and all-purpose flour. We want this mix to have some softness, but we're not using sourdough here, so we do still want some flavor, and the use of darker flours helps give flavor and taste. We use sugar because we need to feed the yeast. I'm going to add a little bit of water to this yeast to activate it-- just really a soup spoon of it, no more. In this recipe, I'm using an active dry yeast, and the water here helps activate the fermentation process. So if you leave it for a couple of minutes, then you'll start getting this more bubbly structure. So we've got flour. We've got sugar. We've got yeast. We're going to add the salt, and I'm going to keep it away from the yeast, because that deactivates the yeast. And I'm going to use black pepper. Now, it's really important that you freshly mill your pepper. Freshly ground pepper just has more to say, because the grains will have kept more flavor. And as you crush them, then they give their everything. If your pepper has already been ground, it's basically started drying up. I'm going to start the mixing of the dough. So at this point, I do a first mix, and I do it just to bring the ingredients together. We don't want to be biting in through one big pocket of black pepper. That's all that this is about. So the black pepper I use in this recipe is a blend of peppers, and it's a little bit like a symphony. When you want to have a full story, a full expression of different flavors, you wouldn't go for just one bl...
About the Instructor
As a third-generation baker and CEO of the renowned Parisian bakery Poilâne, Apollonia Poilâne keeps time-honored traditions alive with every loaf. Now she’s sharing the joy of making bread from scratch with her recipes and hands-on demonstrations. Learn how to make your own starter and a variety of French breads, including rustic wheat, rye, and brioche. Taste, smell, and feel your way to fresh, warm bread at home.
Featured MasterClass Instructor
Apollonia Poilâne
Poilâne CEO Apollonia Poilâne teaches the renowned Parisian bakery’s philosophy and time-tested techniques for baking rustic French breads.
Explore the Class