Pains au Lait (French Milk Bread)

Pains au Lait are soft and fluffy French milk buns, which are a popular afternoon tea treat for children in France. Make these delicious buns at home with this step-by-step recipe.

French Milk Bread

We all know about Japanese Milk Bread, and we know about French Brioche. But something which is perhaps a little less known outside of France is French Milk Bread, or Pains au Lait. French Milk Bread is hugely popular within France, but it is primarily marketed for children, especially for snacks and afternoon tea. But we big kids love them too!

What are Pains au Lait?

Pains au Lait, or Petit Pains au Lait, translates as milk bread in French. They are a sweet bun made from an enriched dough, and taste very similar to a French brioche bun, but they are made with less butter. This is quite obvious when you look at the colour of the dough; the dough of a Pain au Lait bun will be much whiter in colour than a brioche bun, which are always yellow in colour.

Pains au Lait

You can find Pains au Lait at many French bakeries, and they are often shaped in a long oval bun with an exposed seam down the middle.

They are sometimes sold plain, or sprinkled with pearl sugar, or even contain chocolate chips throughout.

Pains au Lait are so popular in France, especially as a goûter or afternoon tea snack for children, that you can find an entire supermarket aisle filled with different varieties of these buns. The industrially produced buns are very soft and squishy, and they therefore appeal more to children than most homemade or bakery versions.

These buns are also quite popular in Switzerland, where they are called Milchbrötchen in the German-speaking parts. My kids love it when they are served these buns at Hort (after-school care) in the afternoons.

Pains au Lait Recipe

I happen to love the mass-produced Pains au Lait 🙂 In the same way that I love plastic white bread for making toast, there is something about the unnaturally soft and bouncy supermarket versions of Pains au Lait that is very comforting and satisfying to eat.

So my recipe for Pains au Lait attempts to replicate the mass-produced version in shape and texture, rather than the shape you will more commonly find in French bakeries. This means that the buns are shaped in small logs and baked close together, so that they rise more, which will give them a softer and fluffier texture.

I use my recipe for Finger Buns to make Pains au Lait, which is my go-to enriched dough recipe that I use for many different types of buns, such as Cream Buns, Cinnamon Rolls, Cardamom Buns, Chinese Coconut Buns … the list is endless!

You can make the buns as big or as small as you like. I make them on the small side so that my kids can pack them in their lunch box for morning tea at school.

How to Make Pains au Lait

Step 1

Measure the flour, sugar, yeast and salt into the bowl of an electric stand mixer. Lightly mix the ingredients together.

Step 2

Add the egg to the bowl. Slowly add the warm milk (you may not need all of it), and lightly beat everything with the dough hook until it comes together into a large ball of dough. Only add as much milk as you need to bring the ingredients together into a dough.

Step 3

Slowly incorporate the butter, one tablespoon at a time, until all of the butter has been used.

Then increase the speed to medium and continue kneading with the dough hook for 15 to 20 minutes, or until the dough is smooth and elastic.

Step 4

Lightly oil a large mixing bowl, and place the dough into the bowl. Cover the bowl with a clean tea towel and leave it somewhere warm for 1 to 1.5 hours, or until the dough has doubled in size.

Step 5

Once the dough has doubled in size, gently remove the dough from the bowl. The dough will deflate as you handle it.

Divide the dough into 16 equal portions. If you have time, use a digital scale so that each bun is the same size. On this occasion, I didn’t use a scale, so you can see below that my buns vary in size slightly, but that’s not a bad thing 😉

Roll each piece of dough into a ball by pulling the edges towards the centre, and then rolling into a smooth ball.

Then flatten each ball of dough into a small log. The log should be roughly half the width of your baking pan. What you are aiming to do is fill up your baking pan with two rows of logs.

Repeat until you have 16 logs of dough.

Butter a baking pan and place the logs of dough side-by-side, leaving a bit of room for them to prove and puff up.

I use two baking pans which measure 17 x 27 x 4 cm (7 x 11 x 1.5 inch), with a cake pan divider for the second pan. Ideally, you want a high-sided baking pan so that the buns can rise; it is the height which makes the buns soft and fluffy.

Once you have filled the baking pans with the logs of dough, leave them somewhere warm for about 30 minutes, or until they have puffed up slightly and are touching one another.

Step 6

Once the dough has puffed up nicely, lightly brush with egg wash, and generously sprinkle with pearl sugar.

Bake in a preheated oven at 220°C/428°F for about 25 minutes.

Check the buns at about 10 minutes, and if they are browning too quickly, cover them with a loose sheet of foil for the rest of the baking time. The buns are cooked if an internal thermometer reads 85°C/185°F.

How to Serve Pains au Lait

Pains au Lait can be eaten just as they are. They are typically sprinkled with pearl sugar for a bit of sweetness, or you can also find varieties filled with chocolate chips.

But my favourite way of serving and eating Pains au Lait is a French/Danish hybrid: you split the bun in half, slather generously with salted butter, and then place a piece of chocolate in the middle of the bun to create – in effect – a chocolate sandwich.

In France, a large piece broken from a tablet of chocolate is often used as a sandwich filling, whether wedged in a Pain au Lait or piece of baguette.

But in Denmark, they use chocolate sheets (or Pålægschokolade) which are made specifically for sandwiches. The chocolate is wafer-thin, so it is much easier to bite into in a sandwich, even if you add several layers of them. These chocolate thins come in milk and dark chocolate, and they also come in a few shapes and sizes. I love to stock up on them whenever we are in Denmark.

Obviously, if you can’t find Danish sandwich chocolate, you can use any good-quality chocolate that you like. My tip is to choose a thin, wafer-like chocolate which will be easy to bite into.

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