Production

Milk Roll Formula in Baker's Percent: German Milchbrötchen

By Robert Roessler, Food Scientist · Published 14 November 2026

The Milchbrötchen is a soft, slightly sweet German roll made with milk, butter, egg and a little sugar. This page gives the formula in baker's percent and three ways a bakery makes it: direct, frozen green, or frozen pre-proofed.

The formula

For 500 g of flour, sourdough flour included, the dough has 252.5 g of milk, 24 g of water, 47.5 g of egg, 71.5 g of butter, 47.5 g of sugar, 9.5 g of fresh yeast and 9.5 g of salt, 962 g in total. These numbers come from a home recipe with 525 g of flour in total (500 g of flour plus 25 g in 50 g of sourdough), 265 g of milk, one egg, 75 g of butter, 50 g of sugar, 10 g of yeast and 10 g of salt, 1,010 g of dough. Milk is 265 ÷ 525 × 100 = 50.5 %.

Scaled to bakery batches

How the numbers are calculated

1. Add the percentages. 100 + 50.5 + 4.8 + 9.5 + 14.3 + 9.5 + 1.9 + 1.9 = 192.4 %. Total dough weight is always flour weight × 1.924.
2. From the dough you want to the flour you need. Flour = dough weight ÷ 1.924. For 10 rolls of 100 g you need 1,000 g of dough, so 1,000 ÷ 1.924 = 520 g of flour.
3. From the flour to each ingredient. Ingredient = flour × percent ÷ 100. With 520 g of flour: whole milk 263 g, water 25 g, egg 49 g, butter 74 g, sugar 49 g, fresh yeast 10 g, salt 10 g.
4. Pieces from a batch. 10 kg of flour makes 19,240 g of dough. At 100 g per piece that is 192 pieces.

You can do the same with the baker's percentage calculator: enter the percentages above and tick flour and liquid.

Decoration

Decoration is part of the formula. The recipe is only complete with the egg wash and the sugar on top, so both belong in the recipe and in the costing. They are not added to the dough weight and the baker's percent above.

• Egg wash: egg and water in a ratio of 1 part egg to 3 parts water, or 1 to 2, or 1 to 1, depending on how much egg the bakery wants to use. No salt: salt causes spotty, blotchy colour. Brush it on evenly and use fresh egg wash.
• Pearl sugar: about 5 g per roll of about 70 g baked weight is an estimate. Use the grade the specification asks for and spread it evenly over the tray.

In the bakery

• Dough temperature and mixing: a dough temperature of 22 °C. Mix 4 minutes slow and 7 minutes fast, a little slower than for a plain roll. In large mixers, cut the butter into small pieces first. This is a craft bakery process and not an industrial one.
• Dough rest: 60 minutes in the tub, with one stretch and fold in the tub.
• Shaping: 100 g per dough piece, 10 pieces from the dough in the table.
• Route 1, direct: after shaping the pieces go into the proofer for 45 minutes and then into the oven.
• Route 2, frozen "green": freeze the shaped pieces without any proof. Let them thaw for about 10 minutes outside, then 45 minutes in the proofer. This suits a bakery that bakes for its own shops.
• Route 3, frozen pre-proofed: proof the pieces and freeze them. The customer thaws them briefly and bakes them. This is the usual route for rolls delivered to other customers.
• Before the oven: brush the pieces with egg wash and top them with coarse pearl sugar, as in the decoration table above.
• Baking: bake at 190 °C in a fan oven, in practice usually a rack oven, for 15 to 20 minutes until the colour is right. This is lower than for plain rolls at 230 to 250 °C, because milk, sugar and butter colour quickly. Load the rolls and give steam straight away, a medium amount and not too much. After about one minute pull the draft and let the steam escape. The rest of the baking time is without steam.

Things to watch

• The sourdough is counted in full: 50 g of sourdough is taken as 25 g of flour and 25 g of water, so the flour in the table includes that flour and the water row is the water in the sourdough.
• The egg is counted as 50 g, a medium egg. The egg wash and the pearl sugar are in the decoration table, not in the dough table.
• In many bakeries the decoration is forgotten, in the recipe as well as in the costing. Count the egg wash and the sugar as ingredients.
• The home recipe adds a vanilla pod, which is too small an amount to count.
• Most common faults in the bakery: the usual roll faults such as dough too warm, proof too long, wrong oven temperature, steam forgotten, baked too dark or too dry.
• Faults of the egg wash: applied unevenly, so the rolls look patchy; old egg wash, which smells bad and can leave spotty, blotchy colour; too much water in it, so the surface does not shine.
• Faults of the pearl sugar: the wrong grade, coarser or finer than the specification asks for; too much or too little; and uneven spreading by hand, so one side of the tray has too much and the other too little.
• Dull surface: dough too warm, trays dusted too heavily, a dry proof, or too little steam. Keep the dough cooler, dust less, raise the humidity in the proof and give enough steam.
• Hollow, pulled-in bottom: proof too full or baking temperature too low, especially when baking on paper or foil. Load a little earlier and raise the temperature.
• After the freezer: uneven browning and dry spots come from partial drying in storage, and a loose crust from too thick a crust or too long in the freezer. Store covered and as short as possible.

Sources

• King Arthur Baking: Baker's Percentage (professional reference)
• BAKERpedia: Baker's Percent
• Wissensforum Backwaren: Fehler bei Brot und Kleingebäck und deren Beseitigung (Detlef Reineke, 3rd edition 2009)

Information current as of 14 November 2026. The formula is a starting point and needs your own trials with your flour, mixer and oven.