I dug deep into my recipe vault, straight into the Childhood Comfort Food section, to make these Pan De Sal or Filipino Bread Rolls. This is what happens during the pan de mic. Oh, I have reached bad pans (puns) level.
It’s been over two months since “staying at home” and physically distancing happened, and I needed a warm hug in the form of freshly baked buns. We used to get these fresh from the neighbourhood panaderia (bakery) early in the morning.
I learned to eat pan de sal with coffee from a very young age of seven. My cup contained mostly milk or creamer, but dipping the sometimes-piping-hot hand-ripped morsels of pan de sal in coffee was one of my fondest memories of summer mornings with my grandparents.
When I was in university, the thought of having extra time to grab a hot bag of these rolls en route to my 7:30am calculus class was enough motivation to wake up at 6am. I am not a morning person and I lived for these.
When I baked this the other night, that warm first bite was heavenly. Salve for the soul, a hug from distant sweet memories.
Everything will be alright.
I developed this recipe back in 2014 when I got asked for my go-to, but I didn’t have one because I couldn’t get it right. We were baking a lot of bread then, and my partner’s daughters were in their teen and tween—so we had carb-hungry household. We bought a lot of Aling Mary’s Pan De Sal, which the girls have developed a liking to. Because we were consuming about two bags a week and I felt like it was my duty to have them experience the freshly baked pan de sal of my childhood, I put myself to the task of finding a good recipe.
The recipes that I’ve tried were too dry, flavourless, too sweet, or didn’t taste exactly how I remembered it. I ended up developing my own recipe from the basic proportions from previously published recipes, and I applied things I learned from baking a lot of bread.
Some recipes called for bread flour, which works really well, but I found that AP flour is fine. The addition of diastatic malt powder was a game changer. That elevated the bread from good to great. I’ve also tempered the amount of sugar for use in both sweet (ever had pandesal ice cream sandwich—terrific!) and savoury creations (incredible with pulled pork), just like the traditional pan de sal I used to love.
Below is the regular all purpose flour recipe, but if you would like the Whole Wheat Pan De Sal Recipe or want to use it with fresh yeast, I’ve made the recipe with those details exclusively available to newsletter subscribers. You can sign up for it here: https://www.betterwithjoy.com/newsletter. You will receive the recipe after you confirm your subscription. Easy peasy. 🙂
