Pandesal Recipe

Today I wanted to share a recipe that I used over the summer to make Pandesal. Pandelsal is a super yummy bread roll in the Philippines. It has a little subtle sweetness and saltiness, and it is super soft and fluffy. I first tried real Filipino Pandesal when I went to the Philippines when I was eight years old. I woke up to a brown paper bag full of these mini pandesals that my dad has just bought sitting on the kitchen counter. He got it from a Sari Sari store (a family run street store with a large variety of things) across the street. I don’t have a picture of it, but it looked like this:

When I opened the bag up, the smell of the freshly baked pandesal filled the whole downstairs. It was such a joyful scent and I couldn’t resist grabbing a bunch to eat for breakfast before the rest of my family woke up. I snuck a few in a napkin, then went somewhere where no one would see me eating it. It was so yummy, especially since it was warm and fresh. When everyone woke up, I ate some more, but this time with cheese and butter. My mom also gave me a little bowl of coffee to dip my pandesal in and it was magical. After this trip to the Philippines, I went years without pandesal :(. My family would sometimes go to a Filipino store in New Jersey and get pandesal from there, but it was just never the same because it was never fresh. I didn’t have fresh pandesal until a few years later when my family visited my mom’s friend in Virginia. She made fresh pandesal for us and it was the closest thing I’ve had to that brown bag of mini pandesals from the Sari Sari store in the Philippines. This summer, I finally decided to try out the recipe she gave us. It turned out to be really good, so here it is:

Ingredients

1. 3 packages of yeast
2. 1 cup of water
3. 1 tsp of sugar
4. 10 cups of flour
5. 2 cups of sugar
6. 3 tsp salt
7. 3 eggs
8. ½ stick of butter
9. ½ cup of crisco shortening
10. 2 cups of water
11. Bread crumbs

Procedure

1. Let yeast rise in 1 cup of warm water with 1 tsp of sugar (set this aside)
2. Mix dry ingredients (flour, sugar, salt), then add eggs
3. Melt the butter and shortening with water, add to dry ingredients
4. Slowly add yeast to the mixture
5. Knead until smooth
6. Let it rise for 2-3 hours
7. After 2-3 hours, cut the dough into small fist size balls, or smaller (your preference)
8. Roll into bread crumbs
9. Arrange in a baking pan
10. Let it rise again for another hour while on baking pan
11. Bake for 20 minutes at 300F

This is a picture of how mine turned out! It ended up making about 30 pieces of fist sized pandesals with that recipe. Next time, I’m going to try to make mini ones like the ones I had in the Philippines, but other than that I don’t think I’ll change anything with the recipe I used! Some of the pairings I made with this batch of Pandesal was with peanut butter, nutella, cheese, with coffee, with hot chocolate, and we even used it as a burger bun. I hope you try out the recipe some day, it’s pretty straight forward and ends up delicious! 🙂