Dan Lepard milk loaf

A good milk loaf is perfect breakfast fare, and over the years I’ve experimented with various recipes. One that I hadn’t got round to trying until this weekend was Dan Lepard’s version, from his book The Handmade Loaf. His recipe uses milk, melted butter and golden syrup to enrich the dough. As it happened, my parents recently gave me some honey made by an apiarist friend of theirs in Dorset, so I used that instead of the golden syrup, and it worked out well.

Lepard suggests making this as a split tin loaf, but I used  a milk loaf tin from Mermaid. An archaic design that used to be referred to as a ‘musket’ tin, it’s a ribbed metal cylinder made in two halves that clip together. You can see the result below, modelled by my youngest daughter.

Recently, there has been an unpleasant spat over on one of The Fresh Loaf forums regarding Dan Lepard’s recipes and intellectual property rights. I’m going to excercise caution and suggest that if you want to try this recipe out yourself, you should search the web or consult Lepard’s book.

All that notwithstanding, this is great recipe, giving a soft crumb and lovely flavour. It would do well as a sandwich loaf, but I would probably half the amount of syrup (or honey, in my case).