Japanese (milk) bread

How to bake the perfect loaf

Thank you for reading! I wrote a story for Epicurious on onigiri, spent two weeks in Japan during sakura season, came back to eat many a gelfilte fish (I felt an instant familiarity with this because it reminds me of kamaboko and the fish tempura in Japanese oden, which makes sense given how they are all made), and have been experimenting heavily in shokupan, or Japanese milk bread. More on shokupan today!

Breads at Est Village, Yamato Koriyama

Excited by the promise of Kikuya’s seasonal botamochi (they go by ohagi during the autumn) at my grandmother’s kitchen table, I flew through immigration at Haneda with a flash of my Japanese passport, only to wait as my boyfriend snailed through a foreigner queue so lengthy that we missed our Osaka connection. ANA speedily rebooked us on a flight leaving 20 minutes later than the original itinerary, but this was quite a different scene from my previous trip in September when Japan was still largely closed to non-citizens. The golden days!

Shokupan, toasted, Tricolore Ginza

But of course the country would be crowded after essentially three years of lock down, especially with the sakura in full bloom, ranging from a delicate white to a nearly bubblegum pink. I planned to eat my weight in sashimi and bamboo shoots and wagashi and didn’t think that I would come out of this trip with a determination to start baking, or all things, shokupan, or Japanese milk bread (sometimes called Hokkaido milk bread outside for reasons that likely have to do with the high repute of Hokkaido’s dairy¹). While bread might not be the first thing that visitors associate with Japan, bread has been a mainstay in the Japanese diet for decades. According to Yamazaki, schools began to serve milk and bread for lunches in 1946 in part due to American wheat shipments and a shortage of Japanese rice.²

Shokupan with all of its strands

Shokupan is soft from milk and slightly sweet. Most crucially, it characteristically pulls apart in cheese-like strings and should have. a “mochi mochi” texture. My parents would buy loaves of it from Parisienne or other Japanese bakeries, as my brother and I refused the loaves from American supermarkets. We would eat it toasted for breakfast, with strawberry jam and butter. Despite these fond memories, shokupan had largely left my consciousness, replaced by Bien Cuit croissants and Eric Kayser olive loaves.

My shokupan (re)appreciation began in Yamato Koriyama at a small bakery ten minutes from my grandmother’s house. We were there purportedly to pick up some bread for my mother’s friend in Yoshino (my mother explained that Yoshino, while rich in mountain vegetables, wagashi, and kakinohazushi (sushi wrapped in persimmon leaves) was lacking in bakeries). Her friend, the okami (proprietress) of a ryokan running 17 generations strong (and an heir in place) would be facing the beginning of the sakura rush with no time to run out-of-town for bread. I hadn’t given much thought to Japanese breads, but as I surveyed the eclectic spread of chestnut croissants, maple shokupan, and yomogi (mugwort) anpans at this little Koriyama bakery, something shifted. I spent the rest of the trip popping into every bakery that I could find (and there are many). Here I’d like to give a quick overview of some of the most common Japanese breads, many of which are captured as characters in what was my favorite cartoon, Anpanman.

Anpanman characters, Nippon TV

1. Shokupan - the standard white loaf

2. Anpan - a soft bun filled with red bean paste

3. Creampan - a soft bun filled with custard.

4. Melonpan - a soft bun topped with a crosshatched sugar cookie, not unlike a Chinese pineapple bun

5. Currypan - a donut filled with curry

6. Shiopan - A rolled (non-laminated) bread imbued with salted butter.

If social media is any indication, Japan has been enjoying a shokupan renaissance for some time. While loaves of it can be picked up at any combini and supermarket and serve as the basis for tamago sandos and breakfast toast, a number of bakeries have been crafting “steam shokupan” and “nama shokupan” that claim to be softer and richer than the original recipe. I purchased a small loaf of “nama shokupan” from La Pan after I wandered through the cherry blossoms groves at the Meguro River. I hacked off a slice with the coffee spoon in our hotel room and planned to foist off the rest of it to my friends whom I would be meeting with later that night, but ended up eating it at a dive bar in Monzennakacho to survive the lethal combination of shochu and gin that they ordered.

Without access to La Pan back in New York, I have been baking variations of the excellent recipe from the Chopstick Chronicles. I 1.5x the recipe to accommodate my loaf pan, although I wonder how I can bake a bread with an even softer crust. I have been baking the recipe. at 345 degrees instead of the 365 that the recipe states, but I will experiment next with an even lower temperature.

Shokupan #2, baked at 345 degrees using 100% King Arthur bread flour

Shokupan (From the Chopstick Chronicles)

Yudane - Combine and cover the night before (or store in the fridge for up to 3 days)

• 75 grams bread flour (I use King Arthur, and have also swapped in whole wheat)

• 60 grams boiling water

In your stand mixer

• Yudane

• 225 grams whole milk

• 300 grams bread flour

• 4.5 grams (1.5 teaspoons) active dry yeast

• 22 grams (1.5 tablespoons) sugar

• 7.5 grams (2 teaspoons) Diamond Crystal salt - use half the volume if Morton’s

• 15 grams butter

Knead the dough until you can stretch a piece until it is translucent. I use all cold ingredients because it has been roughly 78 degrees in my apartment, but you can heat your milk slightly if you like.

Let the dough rise, covered, until roughly doubled, about 1 hour

Divide the dough into three balls each weighing roughly 230 grams. Roll them against the counter until you get a smooth ball. Cover and let sit for 10 minutes.

Roll the dough into a rough rectangle. Fold into thirds lengthwise and then tightly roll into a ball. Space the dough into your pan so that two of the pieces are pressed against the ends of the pan. Put the third piece in the middle, as far away from the other two pieces as possible. If you do not do this, the pressure from the other two pieces will create an uneven crest in the middle. Cover and let rise until it reaches about 7/10 of the pan height.

Preheat your oven to 345 degrees and bake for 20 minutes, or until the dough is 190 degrees with a thermometer.

I have been trying variations with whole wheat in the yudane and have on my list variations with mochi, yomogi swirl, yogurt-enriched dough, sweet potato, and carrots.

As sandwiches:

Shokupan is of course the default classic sandwich bread in Japan, and I was able to try a number at some wonderfully retro kissaten³ (coffee shops) in Tokyo.

A classic “mixed sando” from Coffee Chopin, Kanda

Some other bites and a question:

So we know that Japanese food is delicious and that Japanese food sells. For every Japanese restaurant in New York, there is another that markets itself as Japanese with bad fonts and sakura. Like a French cafe that festoons itself with Eiffel towers and berets. At what point though, does the marketing become disrespectful? I say that Fushimi, with its torii, its font, and its food (not good), has done just that. Hey, just because tourists flock to Fushimi Inari Taisha to instagram the orange gates doesn’t negate the fact that the torii are meant to mark entry into a sacred space.

On a more positive note:

A tower of moules-frites at Number 10 in Great Barrington. I didn’t snap a pick, but also shared a plate of this at Cafe Paulette in Fort Greene.

Cucumbers! Liebman’s

Gage & Tollner is always my favorite

1. I always struggle with just how much to eat when I travel. I always like to share and will subsist on little bites thinking that more food is around the corner. Often it is, but this also means that I passed on a little milk shop in Kichijoji that sold samplers of milk from different parts of Japan. One of the milks was of course from Hokkaido. It also means that I passed on the steam shokupan in Ebisu because I had my sights sets on a truffled croissant.

2. I hear anecdotally that this bread was much-despised and that students were not allowed to leave any food uneaten. Schools therefore started to devise ways to encourage their students to eat this bread, including deep frying it and coating it with sugar and kinako (soybean powder).

3. 喫茶店 Kissaten is the term for shops that serve coffee and tea with simple foods like sandwiches, purins, and pastas. Ideally, the coffee will be served in Wedgwood or Herend and there will be a suited professional at the bar grinding coffee for each cup.