Vegan Spanish Bread Recipe (2024)

Ingredients

Scale

For the Vegan Spanish Bread Dough:

• 1 and ¼ cups unsweetened vegan milk, warm between 90-110 degrees
• 2 and ¼ tsp active dry yeast
• 5 ¼ cups or 683 grams of flour, divided + 2 tablespoons for kneading
• 1 tsp kosher salt
• ½ cup or 125 grams organic cane sugar
• ⅓ cup or 18 grams vegetable oil
• 2 vegan eggs

For the Vegan Spanish Bread filling:

• ½ cup or 65 grams all-purpose flour
• 1 cup or 120 grams bread crumbs
• ⅔ cup or 154 grams vegan butter
• 1 ⅓ cup or 216 grams organic light brown sugar
• ⅔ cup unsweetened vegan milk

For assembling the Vegan Spanish Bread into rolls:

• ¾ cup or 90 grams bread crumbs
• Aquafaba from can of chickpeas

Make the Bread Dough:

1. In a stand mixer bowl, add the yeast first and pour the warm vegan milk over it. Stir gently and then let stand for 5 minutes or until foamy.
2. Add the vegan eggs, cane sugar, vegetable oil and salt. Use rice paddle or spatula to combine just until mixed.
3. Using the paddle attachment, turn on the mixer on the lowest setting and gradually add the 4 cups of the flour. Do this for about a minute until everything is just mixed. Then turn off mixer.
4. Attach the dough hook attachment to your mixer. Knead the dough at lower setting at 2-4 (at most) and it takes me 2-3 minutes to get it nice and elastic and only very slightly sticky.
5. Shape the dough into a ball and put it back in the stand mixer bowl. Then cover with a damp towel and let rise for 1 to 1.5 hours or until size has doubled.
6. Cover with damp towel and let rise for 1 and ½ hours, or until the size is doubled. Start cleaning up and making your filling.

Making the filling:

1. Heat the vegan butter in a medium saucepan on low. Careful not to burn.
2. Add and thoroughly stir each ingredient into pot one at a time in this order: brown sugar, flour, vegan milk, bread crumbs (so add ingredient, stir, add ingredient, stir, etc)
3. Once all ingredients are in the pot, cook low for one minute, don’t let it get all bubbly and start reducing.

Assembling and baking the Vegan Spanish Bread:

1. When the dough has risen to double the size, gently but firmly punch the dough down and divide it into 16 equal pieces. I use a scale for this to weigh each piece.
2. Using a rolling pin, flatten each portion into more of an oval shape about 6 inches long. Try to put them all on the parchment paper or another floured surface so that they’re not piling on top of one another.
3. When all the balls are flat ovals, start filling each one. The dough is pretty elastic so if it shrank while it was waiting to be assembled, just hold one edge up until gravity pulls at the bottom and stretches out the dough to the length you originally rolled it out to.
4. Lay out each oval vertically. Using 1 tablespoon cookie scoop, take a heaping scoop of filling and place it in the middle of the dough. Then spread with spatula to evenly cover as much of the surface area as possible, right up to the edges.
5. Roll each piece of dough croissant style (so starting from the wider side with the thinner side being visible when done).
6. Arrange the rolls, none touching, in the baking tray lined with the parchment paper. They will rise quite a bit.
7. Use a pastry brush to a layer of aquafaba on the top of each roll.
8. Put each roll in the bed of breadcrumbs and gently sprinkle the milky tops to cover as much as of the surface possible.
9. Cover baking tray with plastic wrap and let the rolls rise for another hour but set a timer for 45 minutes.
10. After 45 minutes, preheat the oven to 350°F. When the oven is at 350°F and it’s been an hour since the bread started its second rise, bake the Spanish bread for 20-25 minutes, or until the rolls are golden.

1. This can be time consuming because the dough has to rise and proof. You have two options to make it a two day process instead (way less stressful).
   1. Make the dough and let it rise overnight in the fridge and then assemble the rolls and let it rise the second time the next morning on the counter before baking.
   2. Make the dough and let rise on the counter in the evening and then assemble the rolls that same evening. Then you can stick it in the fridge overnight for the second rise. All you’d have to do the next day is bake! I like this option better.
2. This is not an overly sweet bread. It tastes more like pandesal (another even more popular Filipino baked good) but with filling. I don’t like too much filling because it’s too sweet so if you need to double the recipe to make it sweeter, go for it.
3. Divide the dough into 16 even pieces. I like to weigh it and make sure each piece weighs the same. (1136 grams/16=71 grams per dough ball)
4. After dividing, you do still have to shape it into an oval and not roll it when it’s still in the original triangular shape after dividing or else it’ll just be too thin and frustrating to spread filling on.