Japanese bread. Traditional types of bread and pastries in Japan The result is worth the effort

Japanese Hokkaido milk bread is a dish that many bakers, especially those familiar with the culture of the eastern country, would like to try. But hands rarely get around to such experiments, culinary specialists say. Perhaps this article will inspire you or your loved ones to prepare fluffy homemade bread with a tender crust.

Those who have tried to prepare Japanese milk bread according to the recipe given below note that the result is really worthwhile. It is amazing, you will be pleasantly surprised by its structure. The dish turns out truly airy, fluffy and tender, like a cloud.

origin of name

For those who are interested in the history of this wonderful bread, of course, it is clear what the word “milk” means in the name of the dish (it contains milk, including dry milk). But few people know why the bread is Japanese (many are also confused by the official name in English-language resources - Hokkaido).

As it turned out, preparing a fragrant and delicate-tasting bread requires the addition of milk from cows grazing in the meadows of Furano on Hokkaido (the name of the Japanese island). Of course, ordinary European chefs will not be able to get such a delicacy, but it is quite possible to replace it with milk produced in their homeland.

Cooking features

Hokkaido Japanese custard milk bread is prepared using a technique called tang jun. The point of this method is to heat the liquid and part of the flour to a temperature close to 65 degrees. This causes the starch in the flour to gelatinize. The resulting paste is later added to the final dough and helps to make our baked goods more soft and fluffy.

Notes

The original recipe for Japanese milk bread calls for 30 percent fat cream, but this rule can be ignored. The difference will be as follows: with a fattier product, the milk bread will be more aromatic, filling and nutritious. Therefore, if for the sake of your taste buds you are ready to sacrifice your figure, you can safely put cream with a higher fat content.

Preparation

First, let's choose a loaf pan. A rectangular one is best - approximately 10 × 30 centimeters. The loaf prepared according to this recipe turns out to be quite large and weighs about 1 kilogram after cooling. It is very tasty to eat tender and aromatic Japanese bread for breakfast with jam or butter with a cup of hot coffee/tea or a glass of milk. The main thing here is not to overdo it.

Ingredients

So, we will need the following ingredients to prepare Japanese bread:

• 650 grams of premium wheat flour;
• 300 ml fat milk;
• 30 grams of milk powder;
• 200 ml heavy cream;
• 1 chicken egg;
• 100 grams of granulated sugar;
• a little table salt;
• 5 grams of instant yeast.

The finished baked goods are designed for twelve servings. Cooking time is about five hours.

Information for those losing weight: the calorie content of the dish is quite high and amounts to 272 kcal per 100 grams.

Step-by-step preparation of Japanese Hokkaido bread

If you have regular yeast and not instant yeast, that's okay. You can use dry (take 5 grams - about 1 heaped teaspoon) or pressed (about 15 grams). This yeast is not added immediately to the flour - it must first be activated in a warm, sweetish liquid for a quarter of an hour. You can, for example, heat half a glass of milk with a small amount of sugar and dissolve the yeast in this mixture.

So, take wheat flour and sift it several times. These actions will not only loosen it and saturate it with oxygen, it is quite possible that you will get rid of unwanted debris and lumps.

Next, combine the bulk mixture with the liquid ingredients for the dough. Make a well in the flour and pour warm milk and cream into it. We also introduce the egg there. If you are using compressed or dry yeast, now is the time to add your pre-prepared yeast milk.

Next, you need to knead the dough for at least ten minutes (if 20, even better). After these manipulations, the dough should become smooth, uniform, tender and amazingly soft. So, cover the resulting mass with cling film (you can simply cover it with a towel). Leave to ferment in a warm place for two hours. After 50 minutes of the total time, gently knead our dough (this will help release carbon dioxide from it), then round it and put it back in the heat.

After fermentation, the dough should rise well and triple in volume. Then you need to divide it into four identical pieces.

We roll each of them and place them on a board that has been previously sprinkled with flour. Cover the dough and leave it like that for another twenty minutes.

At this time, the dough balls should swell. Only after this can you proceed to shaping the Japanese milk bread.

So, sprinkle the work surface with flour, roll out one bun lengthwise using a rolling pin. You should end up with a long oval or rectangle the width of the shape. There will be no problems with the dough - it can be rolled out perfectly.

You should end up with four rolls.

The workpiece is covered with a towel (cling film) and set aside. It should sit for one and a half hours. Preheat the oven to 175 degrees.

Place the doubled portion in the oven.

By the way, if you want to get a golden brown crust, you need to grease the dough with milk (the same can be achieved with egg yolk).

The result is worth the effort

As a result, we get tall and rosy baked goods with a delicious aroma. After cooking, the bread should sit for a few more minutes in the pan, after which we take it out and put it on a wire rack (to cool).

Once completely cooled, Japanese Hokkaido bread can be easily cut with a knife. Of course, such baking takes a lot of time. On the other hand, what prevents you from leaving the dough to “ripen” and go do other things?

Bon appetit to those who decided to prepare this milk cloud with an airy and aromatic crumb in an ensemble with the finest golden brown crust! The results from ordinary products are simply amazing.

Someone once asked me on Instagram if I had already made Hokkaido bread. But the fact is that traditionally no one here likes Japanese bread - it’s too white, soft, fluffy, fluffy, and sometimes it even happens that you fry it - and it’s impossible to eat it when it’s cooled, it’s so... not good. When fresh it’s like cotton wool, when it’s stale it’s like cardboard, there’s no life or pleasure in it. But in May I bought a book by a Frenchman who has worked in Kobe all his life and laid the foundation for a network of bakeries throughout Japan. Among his recipes, of course, there is also bread in the form the Japanese love it. It is this, and not a baguette or ciabatta, that is sold everywhere, in any village, in any convenience store, in a drag store... in general, when they say “bread”, the Japanese mean this

In Japan it is simply called shokupan, table bread, so to speak. But I have never come across “Hokkaido bread”; there is simply no such name. Bread of this type can be with a pot-bellied crust or strictly 4-cornered (if baked in a closed form), can be long or almost cubic in shape, and can be sold already cut into slices. It also comes with the addition of a small amount of whole grains, whole grain or rye flour. But he is always very soft. And if we talk about Hokkaido, then this bun most likely comes to mind - a cheesecake with an image of the island. It makes me acutely nostalgic, because I tried it in the first hours of my stay in Japan :))) But it contains some monstrous amount of calories, so since then I have hardly eaten them)))

Hokkaido is actively developing the traditions of growing wheat and making flour, borrowing technologies from countries that are more advanced in this regard, in particular Canada. I haven’t baked with Hokkaido flour yet, I always reach for French flour, but someday I’ll try. And now I want to give you a recipe for Japanese bread from Mr. Bigot, it does not contain eggs, honey and other ingredients that I see in non-Japanese recipes, and which are clearly superfluous. The only unusual ingredients here are milk and butter. Watching how the child made bad, but soft store-bought bread without crusts, I tried to bake it at home, and what a miracle - they eat it no worse than our rougher bread.

The recipe is for 2 loaves with a format of 32x10.5x11.5 cm, this is a lot, I take half and it turns out to be one big loaf.

Lys d`Or flour - 500 g. This is French baguette flour, quite white, it produces fluffy and aromatic dough. My Japanese sources say that baguettes are made with medium gluten flour, not the strongest and not the weakest.
Super King flour - 500 g. You can use regular high gluten flour. I think you can generally try to take only 1 type of white flour, with a protein amount of about 11.7-12%, nothing fatal should happen.
Powdered milk - 50 g
Regular milk - 200 g
Water - 540 g
Fresh yeast - 7 g
Dry instant yeast - 7 g
Sugar - 40 g (too much for our taste, need to be reduced by half)
Salt - 20 g
Unsalted butter - 60 g

The butter is added in the middle of the kneading in a soft form.

Fermentation - 2 hours, after the first hour the dough must be kneaded. I keep the dough at a temperature of 35 degrees and for a little longer than indicated in the recipe. It is not necessary, in my opinion, to strictly maintain the temperature, it’s just that at 25-27 degrees it will take more time, and with such an amount of yeast the dough has no chance of not rising.

Remove the dough from the container, relax on the table for 20 minutes, then cut. You can twist a rope from 2 parts of dough and place it in a rectangular shape, then the bread will turn out with interesting stains on the surface. You can divide the dough into 4-5 round buns, they will merge in the mold, there will be a beautiful top, and it is convenient to divide into parts.

Proof for 60 minutes, the dough will increase in size by about 8 times, as written in the book. For half the recipe, I took a large mold, although I really doubted it, the bread fit perfectly into it. At the beginning of the proofing, the dough filled probably a fifth of the mold, no more.

Baking: 200 degrees, 45 minutes. Nothing is said about steam, but I added the first 10 minutes; if it is baked with the pan lid closed, then, logically, steam is not needed.

In Japan and the countries of the East, bread, as we are accustomed to imagine this main food product of human life, was not popular, and it was simply not needed. Since time immemorial in Japan, rice has served as an alternative to classic baked goods made from flour and has perfectly replaced traditional types and varieties of bread. Bread was first tasted here with the arrival of the first sailors from Portugal. The word "PAN" - which means bread in Japanese - comes from the Portuguese - pao. After the Portuguese, after some time in the land of the rising sun, the Danes, English, Spaniards, French, and Dutch also tried to settle, building bakeries and baking baked goods for their own needs. However, all attempts to accustom the Japanese to bread were unsuccessful; bread did not take root on the Japanese table. And from the middle of the 17th century, after the Japanese rulers completely expelled foreigners and closed the country from the outside world, no one remembered bread for more than 200 years. Only after 1868 the country was again open to the whole world, the bread again declared itself in full. However, this time too the main consumers were foreigners. The first Japanese bakery was opened in 1871 in Tokyo. by a certain Yasube Kimura and had the same name “Kimuraya”. In the first days of work, the bakery baked bread using Dutch technologies and recipes. But immediately, a problem arose in marketing the products, because the taste of the baked goods did not correspond to the taste preferences of the local residents. Then the pre-baker replaced the yeast with the sediment remaining after the fermentation process of rice in the production of sake, called stillage. Sales of baked goods increased significantly, but bread still remained an unusual and outlandish product for the Japanese and was never able to gain a foothold in the category of staple foods for the Japanese people. The only bread product that was popular at that time was “Pan-an”. These Japanese buns have an original taste, thanks to the same sake lees starter and bean filling. Kimurai Bakery began baking these buns in 1875. and dedicated these baked goods to the reigning Emperor Meiji at that time. This delicacy immediately gained immense popularity among Tokyoites, but not for long.

The next stage of the spread of bakery products in Japan was directly related to the social and political situation in the country at that time. The navy and army were formed according to the model of Western countries; much was taken as an example, but the soldiers’ diet remained the same, traditionally Japanese. And then the problem of a disease arose among military personnel - pellagra (beriberi), which is caused by insufficient content in the diet vitamin B1, which is found in sufficient quantities in wholemeal flours. Gradually, baked goods made from this type of flour began to be introduced into the army diet, thanks to which there was a noticeable improvement in the health of military personnel, and the opinion that eating bread was good for health only became even stronger. In large cities such as Osaka and Tokyo, they gradually began to appear bread shops from different countries, whose products were mainly aimed at foreigners. For example, in Tokyo, a German bakery was famous for its black rye bread, about a dozen bakeries specialized in French pastries, and pecked bread was baked in a Polish bakery. But until the early 1970s, bakery products in Japan were not able to take their rightful place in the diet of the population of this mysterious country.

Favorite types of bread in Japan

Even until the mid-19th century, the Japanese We practically didn’t eat bread, but thin flatbreads “Mochi”, made from a special type of rice flour, have always been held in high esteem and are still extremely popular among most residents. In the modern world, Western and Eastern cultures are closely intertwined, and the main merger is observed in the culinary arts. Not so long ago, or rather since the early 70s of the last century, classic types of bread began to be consumed in Japan, and now the average person’s meal can contain various types of pastries, as well as toast and sandwiches. The bread here not only has an exotic name, but also has an original composition and recipe, which is adapted and slightly modified to suit the taste preferences of the majority of the population. To put it simply, Japanese bread does not contain many calories and is lighter. Bread “Sekou Pan” The most common type of bread in Japan, traditionally prepared has the rectangular shape of our brick, tastes a little sweet, very soft and fluffy. The dough for this bread is prepared on a milk-yeast basis, thanks to which this type of bread can remain soft for a week.

Good to know: Not long ago in Japan, there was a watermelon fever due to the famous square-shaped watermelons, which were forbidden to eat. One of the bakery product manufacturing companies decided to eliminate this unfair discrepancy between tasteless contents and attractive appearance by starting to bake in watermelon flavored bread.

”Japanese milk bread”- This is an unusually airy and soft pastry, with an almost weightless internal dough structure and a golden-brown crispy crust. The dough is prepared very simply, take some of the flour and brew it together with a certain amount of liquid. Such The method of preparing the dough is called “tangzhong”, and specifically bread baked using this technology has the name ”Hokkaido”. This baked product is ideal for making sandwiches, sandwiches, bread pudding or croutons. Almost all names of bread in Japan contain the word Pan, which means bread. Also, the name will directly depend on what filling is inside the product. If Sekupan, for example, is greased with a very popular sweet bean paste in Japan, then the bread will already will be called “An Pan”, which translated means legumes in bread.

Baked goods up to 0.500g are in great demand ”Reizun Pan” (raisin buns). Thanks to the unique milk evaporation technology, the buns come out fluffy with a unique internal structure. This flour product is eaten exclusively fresh, because after a day it acquires a sour taste and the shape of the product falls off. For morning breakfasts, the prudent Japanese came up with “Cope Pan” – buns based on butter dough, which are divided into two parts, placing the filling of cheese, ham and deep fat between the parts. Of your favorite baked goods, it’s worth highlighting “Melon Pan” – butter bun, the top of which is sprinkled with powdered sugar after readiness, its color reminiscent of a melon with an attractively fragrant crust.

The recipe for Hokkaido milk bread has appeared on the Internet for a very long time. But unfortunately, I don’t know Japanese in any of the many languages ​​that I can read; I couldn’t find any information about where exactly this bread came from, or what the history of its origin is. However, he looks so seductive that I just couldn’t resist. Despite the main consumption of rice and noodles, it is not uncommon to find bakeries and “Western” bread in Asian countries. In many Asian countries, this is part of the colonial past, and in some it is simply a fashion for everything “Western”. Therefore, it is very possible that Hokkaido milk bread is actually related to Japan and its island of the same name, which is famous for its dairy products. This bread is very airy and light and if it had more sugar, it could be called a bun.

Thanks to the method of brewing flour, called Tang Zhong, and a special method of shaping, by rolling out the dough, folding and twisting, Hokkaido milk bread is very soft and doughy. All children will definitely be delighted, adults will also not be able to deny themselves a piece of such bread, greased with butter and their favorite jam :-).

Although the method is called Tang Zhong, brewing flour for bread is by no means new and is very common. For the first time I practiced brewing like this for cooking. Traditional Lithuanian rye bread is also baked from flour that is partially boiled. It is not known who was the first to practice this method. For many Asian dumplings (wontons, gyoza, etc.) and pancakes (like), flour is poured with boiling water. And given the antiquity of Asian cuisine and its development in ancient times, it is very likely that this dough preparation technology came from there. One way or another, the method is definitely worth attention.

Hokkaido milk bread dough is moderately sticky and that's how it should be. And in order not to add excess flour when kneading, you should grease your hands and work surface with oil. This will not harm the test and it will be much easier to work with.

The characteristic rolling and folding of Hokkaido milk bread dough rolls aims to stretch the gluten in the dough, which makes the overall texture of the bread's flesh more uniform and more elastic. Therefore, this step is very important and directly affects the quality of the baked bread.

1) Work in a draft-free room;

2) Preheat the oven thoroughly before inserting the pan with bread into it;

3) Do not open the oven for the first 15 minutes of baking so that there is no temperature difference in the oven;

4) Before slicing, be sure to leave the bread to cool completely, otherwise even well-baked bread, cut before cooling, will be lumpy.

Enjoy your bread and enjoy baking!

For brewing Tang Zhong:

• 100 ml milk
• 20 grams of flour

For the test:

• 150 ml milk
• 2 tbsp. Sahara
• 15 grams of fresh yeast
• 400 grams of flour
• 1 egg
• 1 tsp salt
• 10 grams butter

additionally:

• 1 egg
• 2 tbsp. milk
• Butter for greasing the pan
• Boroshno for posipannya formi
• Vegetable oil for lubricating the work surface

1) Prepare Tang Zhong tea leaves. To do this, place the milk and flour in a small saucepan and put on low heat. Heat, stirring constantly until the mixture thickens. Remove from heat, add butter, mix well and leave until cool.

2) Heat the milk a little, add sugar and yeast. Stir well until the yeast is completely dissolved.

3) Place milk with yeast, egg, salt, flour and Tang Zhong tea leaves into the bowl of a planetary mixer or deep bowl. Knead on low speed for 5 or 10 minutes with your hands. When pressed, the dough should return to its original shape. This means it has been kneaded well.

4) Cover the dough with a slightly damp towel or cover the bowl tightly with cling film and leave to rise for about 1.5 hours at room temperature. The dough should double in size.

5) Grease a rectangular bread pan with a thin layer of butter and sprinkle with flour. Shake out excess flour.

6) Knead the risen dough and place it on a work surface greased with a thin layer of vegetable oil. Grease your hands with vegetable oil and divide the dough into 3 equal parts.