Cooking
Butterfly Pea Bread (Braided Blue Milk Bread)
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This braided blue bread is a super fun recipe that will make your next breakfast the happiest meal! It’s a fluffy milk loaf prepared with butterfly pea flower, a wonderful blue flower from Asia. Deliciously spongy, exotic, and colourful — what’s not to love about this loaf? So, let’s make it together!
Butterfly pea flower, or blue pea for short, is a vibrant blue flower native to Southeast Asia. It’s rich in blue-violet pigments and has a delicately sweet and floral taste with subtle earthy notes.
The dried flowers are traditionally brewed into a soothing blue tea. They’re also a natural food colourant for rice, noodles, drinks, and even jellies, cakes, and other desserts.
And yes, you can use blue pea to make blue bread too!
For this recipe, you’ll need all the classic bread ingredients — flour, salt, warm water, and yeast; plus powdered butterfly pea flowers for colour.
We’ve also used oil and coconut milk to get that fluffy, tender crumb that makes milk bread so good! But because there’s no cow milk or butter, this recipe is totally dairy-free and vegan, which is a nice plus!
As for the powdered butterfly pea flowers, you can find them online or at health food stores, sometimes called “blue matcha” powder.
The powder is made by pulverising the dried petals of blue pea flowers. It’s much more concentrated with blue pigments than the simple dried flowers. So it’s perfect for recipes where you need to achieve a deep blue hue, like this blue sponge cake and, of course, this blue bread.
If you want to keep things nice and simple, you can knead all ingredients together into a blue dough and make the whole loaf blue.
Or, you can split the dough in half and make a two-colour braided bread, as we did. It’s super easy — and it will look super pretty! So, follow along, and we’ll show you how!
And if you’re looking for more fun bread recipes, check out this purple bread with ube butter, banana bread with mochi flour or vegan pumpkin babka loaf. They are all incredibly delicious!
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