Baking a loaf of milk bread is the closest
I’ll ever get to time travel.
This recipe delivers an approximation
of the sikppang, or white bread, that my
mother, Jean, brought home from the
Korean bakeries along Buford Highway
in Atlanta when I was little, in the 1990s.
Throughout the week, she turned that
pillowy loaf into ham-and-mayonnaise
sandwiches, my favorite school lunch.
Sometimes she cut them into teddy-bear
shapes, which made them taste more
delicious because the crusts were sliced
off (and because they were shaped like
teddy bears). But in my homemade ver-
sion of that bread, the deeply browned
crust is a grand achievement, a source
of inordinate pride, thanks to a full cup
of maple syrup. The amber maple both
dyes the bread a gorgeous hazelnut color20 3.20.22 Photograph by Linda Xiao Food stylist: Maggie Ruggiero. Prop stylist: Sophia Pappas.
A Cottony Crumb: Milk bread at its best is soft
and almost sweet, with a wispy, ethereal texture.
Eat By Eric Kim
Its taste, though
familiar to many,
conjures a different
feeling depending
on who you
are and how you
remember it.and caramelizes into an exterior that you
actually want to eat.
My milk bread isn’t traditional by
any means, but the end result gets you
close. When I asked Kristina Cho, who
wrote the cookbook ‘‘Mooncakes and
Milk Bread,’’ ‘‘What is milk bread?’’ she
asked me if I wanted the technical answer
or the emotional one. Of course, I said
emotional. This is how she described it