I’ve been baking sandwich bread about every week since 2004, and two weeks ago I learned that I’d been missing out on a fairly simple technique to make softer loaves that stay fresh longer.

It’s called tangzhong, and I learned about it from a tweet from science journalist Erin Biba. I read the introduction she shared from King Arthur Flour’s blog, then that blog’s explanation of how to work this into a standard sandwich-bread recipe.

“Tangzhong” is either Chinese for “soup starter” or “flour roux,” depending on where you read, and it’s a way to incorporate more water into bread dough without it evaporating and making the bread stale as fast as usual. You do that by cooking a small amount of flour and water in a pan until they form a slurry–as if you were making roux for homemade mac and cheese–that locks in the moisture, Then you combine this with  the rest of your flour mixture before adding your yeast mixture and proceeding as usual.

The King Arthur directions started simple: 3 tablespoons flour and half a cup of water in a pan over medium heat until the mixture thickens. But then math intruded, in the form of calculations to determine how much water to add to the rest of the recipe to ensure that the water added up to 75 percent of the weight of the flour.

The first try, I spent so much time weighing ingredients–a somewhat irritating step when you’re putting flour and then water on a scale in measuring cups already labeled to tell you how much of something they contain–that I forgot to add the weight of that initial half cup of water back in and instead poured in almost a quarter of a cup more water into my yeast-and-water mix. The result was an unmanageably soupy dough that I couldn’t work with until I’d added maybe another half cup of flour above the 3 1/2 cups in my standard recipe.

That left me with more risen dough than I’d need for one loaf, so I broke off a bit and formed that into hot dog rolls and hamburger buns. All were delicious, if done at least half an hour behind schedule. The bread was notably softer and fluffier–more like the pre-packaged sort I renounced buying 15 years ago when I was just embarking on baking hipsterdom–and kept fresh longer, freeing me from wanting to relegate the last couple of slices to toast or a grilled-cheese sandwich.

The second try, I decided to wing it a little and not add any water beyond the half cup in the tangzhong and the 1 1/4 cup in which I normally pour yeast and honey to start. I also saved myself some complexity by putting all of the flour in the stand mixer’s bowl, then taking out 3 tablespoons for the tangzhong. But once again, I still had dough too damp to work, so I added a little more flour and once again got some bonus rolls.

On the third try, I used only 1 3/4 cup of water to start the yeast, leaving me with 1 1/2 1 1/4 cups of water in the total recipe. As in, close enough to not too far below the proportions the King Arthur recipe had specified, if only I’d paid more attention the first time, but also the same amount of total water as in my usual bread-baking practice.

On this iteration, the dough came away from the sides (if not the bottom) of our stand mixer like usual, and the finished loaf was fantastic like the others. As I write this, I am already looking forward to tomorrow’s sandwich for lunch.

Updated 5/16 to correct totals for the third iteration.