I Spent Years Testing Milk Bread Techniques. This Is the Recipe to End All Recipes (2024)

Japanese milk bread, or shokupan, is one of the world’s true wonder breads. An ultra-soft, squishy, and impossibly light loaf, shokupan has a mild but distinct sweetness, with a fine, pillowy crumb the Japanese call “fuwa fuwa,” or “fluffy fluffy.” The bread is baked in deep rectangular Pullman pans, giving the loaf a tall profile.

There are two main styles of shokupan, each determined by whether the loaf is baked with the lid on or off the pan. ”Kaku” means “square,” and refers to loaves that have been baked with a lid on. This method yields perfectly right-angled loaves, making them ideal for sandwiches (“sandos,” in Japanese). “Yama,” or “mountain,” means the loaf is baked without a lid on; because the rolls of dough are placed side-by-side into the pan, they form a lofty ridge of hills as they rise and bake.

No matter the style, shokupan usually consists of three or four pieces of dough that bakers press into long, thin strips, then roll into tight spirals, giving the loaf’s internal crumb its feathery, layered, and peel-apart texture. The rolls are usually set into the pan crosswise, making the swirls visible along the long side of the loaf after baking. Bakers typically brush the top of shokupan with melted butter as soon as it emerges from the oven or a wash of egg before baking to give the baked bread a mirror-like finish. (Such washes are only applied to the domed tops of shokupan baked without a lid.)

The origins of shokupan are something of a muddle. Some food writers, including Elyse Inamine for Bon Appétit, attribute the creation of milk bread to British baker Robert Clarke, who opened Yokohama Bakery in 1862. While ads in Japanese newspapers from that era do tell us that a Robert Clarke owned Yokohama Bakery, it’s difficult to prove that he was the inventor of the famous loaf. Today, shokupan is often the bread of choice for sandos in Japan, where they’re sold in konbinis and hold together fillings like egg salad, katsu (breaded pork or chicken), or fruit and whipped cream.

The Secret to Milk Bread's Texture: A Flour Scald

Many shokupan recipes employ a yudane—a Japanese technique of whisking flour and boiling water together and cooking on the stove until thickened—which helps the bread retain its soft texture. This method is more commonly known as a tangzhong, its Chinese equivalent. Bakers collectively refer to these sorts of techniques as “flour scalds.”

Though yudane and tangzhong are very similar and have a nearly identical effect on the breads they’re used in, they call for slightly different ratios of wet-to-dry ingredients. Shokupan recipes haven’t always incorporated a yudane, but it’s such an effective way of producing tender loaves that most modern recipes utilize one.

To explain why scalds are so good at keeping loaves soft, we first need to talk about starch gelation. When starch and water combine, the starches hydrate, absorbing some of the water and softening slightly. When that mixture is heated above a certain temperature (this varies from starch to starch, but is always somewhere between 120˚ and 165˚F (49º and 74ºC), the starch granules absorb even more water. They swell and eventually burst, releasing amylose and amylopectin, the two molecules that make up starch, which link up into a loose network with the water trapped within it. If you’ve incorporated a roux into a gravy or used a cornstarch slurry in a stir-fry, then you’ve seen starch gelation in action. As you incorporate the starch into the sauce and heat it up, it slowly thickens and eventually becomes viscous enough to coat a spoon.

A flour scald in bread takes advantage of this phenomenon in two ways. One, because a gelled mixture of flour and water is drier in texture than an identical ungelled one, it allows you to make a dough with more water in it than it could otherwise contain—without it turning to soup. I call this “stealth” hydration: The extra water is there, but you can’t see or feel it in the dough.

Secondly, the presence of a scald makes a bread far more resistant to staling than dough made without one. More accurately known as starch retrogradation, staling is the reversal of gelation, where the water in the starches gets pulled out of them, causing the starches to crystallize and harden. The more water in a bread, the longer it takes for the starches to retrograde. (Stale bread seems dry, but it isn’t necessarily, at least not initially. The starches have crystallizes in a stale bread, but the water may still be hanging around nearby; this is the reason that toasting stale bread can restore some of its original tenderness.)

Sweet, Sweet Rice Flour

Which brings me to sweet rice flour. As I mentioned above, starch is made up of two types of molecules: amylose and amylopectin. Amylose molecules are long chains of glucose linked together, with only a few branches hanging off the central chain here and there. Crystals form most readily when the molecules in question can stack together neatly. Because amylose molecules are mostly straight chains, they are especially prone to crystallizing as food cools. (This is why long-grain rice, which contains around 20% amylose, becomes especially hard and brittle when refrigerated.) Meanwhile, amylopectin molecules are highly branched, making them unable to stack together and crystallize as efficiently.

The starches in wheat flour are 28% amylose and 72% amylopectin, which makes it a less-than-perfect choice for a flour scald—one of the big benefits of using a flour scald is it slows staling, but wheat flour has a healthy dose of staling-prone amylose. Sweet rice flour, on the other hand, is nearly 100% amylopectin, making it ideal for using in a scald—especially if you want the bread to stay soft for as long as possible.

The Pour-Over Method

Another advantage to using sweet rice flour instead of wheat flour in a scald: It’s much easier to make. The standard tangzhong method has bakers combine flour and cold water (usually in a 1:4 ratio) until it is uniform. Bakers then cook the mixture on the stovetop until it gels. While this is an effective technique, it is—simply put—a pain in the ass, as it’s challenging to get the sticky paste out of the pan and into the dough completely.

The yudane method, on the other hand, calls for stirring together a 1:1 mixture of flour and boiling water. While this works too, two potential problems arise with this technique:

1. Wheat flour and boiling water don’t always play nicely with one another. Instead of becoming a smooth, uniform gel, the mixture sometimes results in lumps of dry flour that are difficult to eliminate even with vigorous whisking.
2. With such a low ratio of flour to boiling water, the final mixture can end up below the optimal gelation temperature (120º to 165ºF or 49º to 74ºC). This means the starches in it won’t be completely gelled, defeating the entire purpose of a scald in the first place.

There’s no question that between the two techniques, the yudane pour-over method is easier and simpler to pull off. I use a technique similar to the yudane method, where I pour boiling milk over glutinous rice flour and sugar and whisk the mixture until it thickens to a pudding-like consistency. Unlike the traditional yudane method, though, I use much more flour than is typical—20% of the total weight compared to the 5 to 10% most shokupan recipes contain—and instead of bread flour, I use sweet rice flour for all the reasons mentioned above. I also use a different ratio of 1 part flour to 3 parts liquid. This approach produces a smooth, thick gel easily and quickly, with no lumps in sight.

The Key Techniques to Making Shokupan

After spending years tinkering with my own milk bread recipe—testing various types of flour and methods for making the scald, and slowly increasing the total amount of liquid in the dough—I think I’ve finally landed on the fuwa fuwa bread of my dreams. It’s easy to make and produces a gorgeous, tender loaf that stays that way for at least a few days—far longer than most enriched breads without a tangzhong, and an extra day or so from most other tangzhong-containing shokupan.

Like many other shokupan recipes, my formula contains flour, milk, butter, eggs (in this case, just the yolks, for their color and tenderizing fats), sugar, salt, and yeast, with a flour scald for all the reasons mentioned above. I have, however, incorporated one last trick of my own to make it as soft and fluffy as possible: more milk.

Hydration Is Key

The more liquid you have in a dough, the softer its crumb may be—which is why I make my shokupan with as much milk as possible, as its fat and protein lends the loaf additional color and tenderness. There’s a limit to how much liquid you can add, though—beyond a certain point, the dough becomes too sticky to handle easily. This is especially problematic with loaves that require plenty of shaping and handling, like shokupan.

To get around this problem, I borrow a technique used in many other enriched bread recipes, including brioche: refrigerating the proofed dough until it firms up (as the butterfat solidifies when cold), at least two hours. This makes it easy to handle during shaping despite its higher ratio of liquid. This also makes the recipe a little more flexible, since the dough can be refrigerated for up to 24 hours before proofing and baking.

Shaping and Proofing

Besides all that, my shokupan method is just like others. After kneading the dough in a stand mixer, it gets a short proof at room temperature to jump-start fermentation, then it goes into the fridge to firm up. Once it’s easy enough to handle, I divide it into pieces and shape each portion into a round. When the rounds have relaxed a little, I roll, fold, and stretch each piece into long, flat strips, and then roll them up like carpets to form spirals. I set those rolls of dough side-by-side in the pan, then let them proof together for a few hours into a single, uniform mass of dough.

I like the yama (mountain) version of shokupan as much as the kaku (square) one, and make them both frequently; the recipe below is for the yama style, but in the notes below I explain how to convert it to the kaku version. One thing to understand about baking breads in a covered pullman pan is that the lid compresses the dough as it bakes. In order to keep the internal crumb as open as a loaf baked without a lid, you need to use slightly less dough when baking with a lid on. Rather than work up two separate formulas for each version, I just use less dough in the loaf pan when I’m making a lidded version, and use the leftover dough to make a single round bun. It’s a baker’s treat, all for me. I usually eat it warm from the oven—and I suspect you’ll want to, too.