Simple Milk Bread With Mollasses and Chia Seed

Must be one of those rare moment where the bread i make became so fluffy, soft and not made fun by my mum for being a brick (like my rye bread).
Here is the recipe in the most simplest form. I use a measuring cup (1 cup=250ml) as basis of measurement

1 cup full cream milk
1 egg
1 tablespoon blackstrap Molasses or sugar (or replace with honey)
1/3 cup butter or about 3/4 inch thick or approximately 50grams (1/5 a bar of butter)
1 tbsp of salt (i use sea salt)
Optional (as i got some leftover) - Blueberry paste/jam (from making muffins) which explained why the milk turned pinkish and has some lumps on the bottom of the pic. Add in the ingredient above according to the order i wrote it.
I make my bread using a bread maker and the results is predictable if you get the recipe right. I have went from following the recipe squarely to learning what each ingredient will do to the bread. Somehow, i managed a perfect one today and i am so sharing this.

Then you put in:
3 3/4 cup of  flour or about 400grams (i use Country Farm 100% organic all purpose flour)
1 pack of instant yeast (11grams)
1 tablespoon of Chia seed.
That's it.
I set the machine to the heaviest (1kg), lightest crumbs and to Wholewheat bread recipe. Estimated to produce a bread within 3hours 38minutes.
Let the machine run and 9minutes to completion, i was surprised how good it looked!

Closed the lid and allowed it to fully complete the cycle and let it rest for about 30minutes to cool down. Removed the bread from the machine and Oh my, she was a beauty!

I removed it from the pan and decided to weight it so i know roughly how heavy the bread will be according to the recipe. It hit home at 825grams. That meant this loaf of bread is double the weight of a normal loaf of commercially available bread. In other words, this is double the recipe. How is this useful?

With this info, i now know if i want a 400gram loaf, all i need is to half the recipe and still get the same results, with only a smaller loaf.

The color of the loaf is dark brown due to the presence of blackstrap molasses. Decision to use this instead of sugar is obvious with the molasses possessing more nutritional value instead of empty calories presence in sugar. Should you use honey, i would suggest you get the purest of honey i,e, not processed honey that has cane sugar in them. It is prevalent in most honey available commercially. If you want another alternative, go for palm sugar or known as gula Melaka.
Experience tells me that this bread will be soft inside. Unlike rye flour that absorb water/liquid and resulting in a hard bread, all purpose flour (essentially wheat flour) that is organic and unbleached gives a certain level of comfort when you are looking to eating better and whole food.

I wasn't disappointed

The bread was cut/divided into 10 slices of bread with each slice about 1 inch thick. I could not cut them thinner as i do not have specialised bread cutter unlike a proper bakery that would give consistent cutting thickness. The calculated caloric and nutritional amount to be close to 200kcal per slice. The bread was almost 6 inches by 5 inches in size, which brings it close to 40% larger than an average slice of commercially available bread.

Not convinced it is that big?? Before i show photographic evidence, a serving(2 slices, 55grams) of Gardenia White Bread locks in 141kcal. It measured 4 inches by 4 inches and is soft even past it's expiry date, as long as it is not exposed to air. Homemade bread are devoid of any preservatives and become stale in 2 days, unless kept in the freezer (and thus, needed to be re-heated or toasted). This is how Gardenia stack up to this homemade bread, for size comparison.

Mass vs Home production

Thick bread! 1 inch vs 2/5 inch!

At double the serving size in volume (6x5x1=30inch cube vs 4x4x0.4x2=16inch cube), one would expect the caloric value to be double. Be surprised.

A serving of the Milk Bread gives a maximum of 250kcal (i forgot to include the molasses into the recipe for calculation and hence over estimate it to be additional 40kcal), which is 30kcal less than two serving, or 4 slices of Gardenia. Weight wise, it will be 110grams (4 slices Gardenia) vs. 82.5gram (1 slice milk bread).
The biggest bonus comes from knowing you are eating something that is much healthier without any unknown fats that the body will not process readily (when compared to pure butter). Technically speaking, this one loaf of bread will provide enough energy for an average person that his/her job requires him/her to be standing/moving from time to time.