Baking – Yeast and Flour for Panasonic Bread Maker

You absolutely don't need a bread maker for good bread. They have been making bread for at least 22,000 years and I promise, in the vast majority of those, having a bread maker would have gotten you stoned as a witch (if you had electricty to run it). However, a good bread maker will vastly cut down on the time you have to spend making bread. Basically, bread by hand requires a few hours and lot of physical kneading to develop the gluten that gives bread it's structure and in a bread machine, you dump the ingredients in, turn it on and walk away, then come back and enjoy some fresh bread.

Damn, that looks good. I've never made this particular type of bread before, but here are some things that I do know which might help:

Butter is (roughly) 10% water and 90% fat, while lard is 100% fat. So if you substitute one for the other, you should adjust the amount of water in the recipe accordingly. The flavor will be a little different, but I bet either one would work.

I would not assume AP flour. In fact, I'd assume high-gluten bread flour. The gluten is what creates those fibers. It's the fat that keeps it tender.

This looks very similar to a brioche, so you might want to look at brioche recipes to learn some of the principles. One thing that most of them will tell you is to to knead the dough to develop the gluten fibers, and then add the butter. This I think is the key. I know that fat can keep gluten molecules from sticking together into strands, so if you add the fat later, you should wind up with strands of gluten surrounded by fat.