There are recipes you see and immediately you're dying to try at least once in your life. The results in the photos online look so perfect it seems impossible you'll ever get something even remotely similar. Well, that's exactly what happened to me with these incredible Swiss buns from María Lunarillos's blog, and I have to say I pulled it off: they came out simply spectacular. I'm sharing the recipe just as I made it, since the proofing times are quite different from the original. Be warned, this isn't one for when you're in a rush, but it's totally worth it…
What do we need?
- 500 g (4 cups) bread flour
- 250 g (1 cup) whole milk
- Two eggs
- 90 g (about 1/2 cup) sugar
- 5 g (1 tsp) salt
- 3 g (1 tsp) active dry yeast
- 80 g (about 1/3 cup) softened butter
- One beaten egg for glazing
- Sugar and water for decorating
How do we make it?
- First, dissolve the yeast in 100 g (about 1/3 cup + 1 tbsp) of warm milk and add 100 g (about 3/4 cup) of bread flour. Mix well with a wooden spoon, cover the bowl, and let it ferment until you see bubbles forming.
- After the resting time, add all the other ingredients except the butter. Start mixing with the wooden spoon and finish with your hands. Let it rest for 10 minutes and knead again, simply pinching a bit of dough from the outside and folding it inward. Repeat this rest-and-quick-knead cycle two more times. You'll notice the dough becomes less sticky and more elastic.
- Add the softened butter and knead again. In my case I used the dough hooks on my mixer, but you can do it perfectly well by hand. You want to end up with a fairly smooth dough.
- Grease a clean bowl with a little sunflower oil and put the dough in, covered with plastic wrap. Let it rest until doubled in size. Since my kitchen was pretty cool, I left it overnight (about 20 hours of proofing in total).
- Once doubled, turn the dough out onto a floured countertop and press it down with your hands to release all the air. Form little balls of 60 g (about 2 oz) each.
- To get perfect balls, pinch them to form a sort of bundle and then roll them. Since a picture is worth a thousand words, you can see this technique in the video by María Lunarillos.
- Let the balls rest on a baking tray lined with parchment paper, covered with plastic wrap, until doubled in size. In my case, I left them for almost 4 hours and they didn't quite double, but it was enough.
- Preheat the oven to 210°C (410°F) and brush the buns with beaten egg, being careful not to flatten them. Brush them twice, leaving about 10 minutes between coats so the egg film dries slightly.
- With a very sharp serrated knife, make a deep cut down the center and sprinkle on sugar moistened with water (just like the kind we use for roscón de reyes).
- Place in the oven on the lowest rack (top and bottom heat, no fan), lower the temperature to 200°C (390°F), and bake for 12 minutes. Finish with 1 more minute with the fan turned on.
- Take them out and let them cool as long as your cravings to sink your teeth into one will let you.
Tips:
– It's not a difficult recipe but it requires time and patience. It's better to trust the look of the dough than the times I give you, since depending on the room temperature and other factors they can vary considerably.
– In many recipes there are ingredients you can easily swap for others, but in this case, you cannot replace the bread flour with regular flour or the active dry yeast with baking powder.
