Milk Bread/Shokupan (食パン)

During my last co-op term, as I was shopping for groceries to cook throughout the week, I discovered that the T&T across from where I lived sold this thing called “milk bread”. It was very square and looked sweet and came in red bean and matcha varieties, so, intrigued, I bought it to use for sandwiches. It was DELICIOUS. Hands down one of the best decisions I’d made that term. I would toast two slices, slather on some Japanese mayo (another great decision), and layer on ham and cheese and spinach, and my lunches that day would turn out glorious. There was just something about the thickness of each slice and the sweetness of the bread that felt so luxurious to me. Some people’s favourite bread is crusty bread or French baguettes or seeded whole-wheat loaves. My favourite bread is pretty much Asian white bread :P

Recipes abound online for milk bread or shokupan, and it seems like different people have different interpretations of what “milk bread” means (I guess in some Chinese bakeries, milk bread refers to the bread they use for pineapple buns and such?). In any case, I just wanted to recreate the sandwich bread I had from that T&T in Metrotown 8 years ago. Here is my recent attempt at following a Japanese shokupan recipe—the photos in the original recipe seemed promising, but my loaf turned out shorter and less fluffy and more yellow than that. But it sure tasted amazing toasted with some tuna salad on top <3 I’ll definitely be trying my hand at this again—maybe next time with an actual Pullman loaf pan, or trying out the NYT recipe version—but for now, I am going to content myself with enjoying some dense, slightly sweet white bread for breakfasts the coming week :)

(original recipe from Chopstick Chronicles)