Pain au Lait

Pain au lait sits in the family of French viennoiseries — the enriched, lightly sweet breads whose technique descends from the Viennese baking that August Zang brought to Paris in 1839. Unlike the storied croissant, it carries no famous origin tale or fixed birth date; it is simply the everyday milk bread of the boulangerie and, later, the supermarket shelf. It is best understood by what it is not: a near relative of brioche, but made with markedly less butter and egg and leaning on milk as its main liquid, so it comes out lighter and far less rich. The familiar finger-roll shape and chevron scoring are conventions of the trade rather than any regulated standard — pain au lait has no protected definition.

Soft all the way through — the thin, burnished crust gives no resistance, and the crumb underneath is fine, fluffy and tender, pulling apart in soft ribbons rather than tearing. It is gently sweet and milky, with the round richness of butter and egg kept deliberately restrained. Warm from the bag it is pillowy and faintly steamy; the pearl-sugar version adds little crunches of melted sweetness, the chocolate-chip one a child's treat. A day on, it is still soft where a baguette would have gone hard.

This is an enriched dough, and the enrichment is the whole character. Milk and a little sugar feed and tenderise; butter coats the gluten strands so the crumb sets fine and short rather than chewy and open; egg adds richness, colour and a little structure. Because there is less fat than in a brioche, the dough handles more easily and proves a touch faster, and the result is lighter. It is kneaded to a full, smooth gluten so it can still trap gas and rise tall despite the fat, given a warm proof, then egg-washed — the egg proteins and sugars brown to that glossy, deep-gold crust in a moderate oven, while the high milk-and-sugar content keeps the inside soft.