I put together a decent recipe using a few online recipes and Alton Brown's good eats episode
Ingredients
For the dough:
- 1 pkg fast-action yeast (ie. the only kind you find on Irish shop shelves)
- 1 tbsp vegetable oil
- 1 cup warm milk
- 3/4 cup warm water
- 1.5 tsp salt
- 1 tbsp honey
- 1 cup bread flour
- 2.5-3 cups plain cream flour
For the alkali bath:
- 3 litres water
- 2 tbsp sugar
- 1/2 cup bread soda
And you need coarse salt, poppy seeds or sesame seeds for sprinkling. Unless you want to make baldies (which aren’t horrible, but really, you’ll prefer these with toppings, and I personally prefer the sesame seeds myself). You don’t need to use a stand mixer to make this recipe, by the way… but unless you have popeye’s arms, you’ll want one. Start off by adding the oil and salt to the bowl of your stand mixer.
Now mix the water and milk in a microwave safe jug and nuke it till it’s warm (not hot, and definitely not boiling – we want to give the yeast a headstart, not kill them). And once it’s warm, add it to the bowl. Now attach the paddle and mix that for a few seconds (mainly you're getting oil and liquid up the sides of the bowl here to stop the dough clambering out later on). Now add theflour. I start off with the bread flour. Now add two of the cups of plain flour (just two, hold off on the last half-to-one cups). Now add inthe yeast on top of the flour. And now add the honey on top of the yeast (we want the yeast to have easy access to the sugar). And now add the next half cup of plain flour on top of the honey