Would you like to eat a new age Japanese bread?

If you eat bread as your main carbohydrate through every meal, you can travel in Japan without concern. All the hotels in which you will stay provide bread for breakfast unless you stay in a genuine Japanese inn. The average taste of those type of bread is generally good, soft, slightly moist, and kind of sweet but not too sweet. Those type of bread might be kind of different from the taste of that of your home country’s bread but you will be able to eat them without worry.

You can catch many gourmet reports about ramen, sushi, yakiniku or others in Japan. Well, the main carbohydrate for Japanese people are rice, noodles and bread. Many Japanese people who live in this gastronomical country take care of the quality of the taste of rice and noodles, and they broadcast many reports about rice and noodles to foreigners. On the other hand there aren’t any reports about bread for foreign travelers because nobody in Japan recognizes that bread made in Japan has any value for foreigners. However, can you think such Japanese people don’t take care of the quality of the taste of bread? No way. So I recommend that you go to a popular bread shop to eat bread. You should be able to experience a texture of high-quality Japanese bread.

I think that bread has been in the new age in Japan. In the previous age bread makers and shops put their main purpose on variety, so they endeavored to make a new bread style. Nowadays new generation bread shops put their purpose on the quality of taste, and they reduce types of bread. The representative case of that is the increase of the shops for only loafs of bread.

This time, I will write about the shop of bread loafs which I love best. This shop, Jizo-ya, is a small garage shop under JR railroad near Rokkomichi in Kobe. However it is so extremely popular that there is a case of sold out every once in a while. Then I get in touch with the shop and I go to the shop to buy two loafs by my car every Saturday for our every family breakfast. The texture of taste is light and soft with good baked wheat flour flavor. I eat it without anything at every breakfast time.

The web site of this shop says in Japanese as follows;

“One way of a bread loaf. Our loaf is rich, and if only the surface is soft. We use a lot of butter and fresh cream which pastry shops use. We do our best only for our loaf day by day. We are fastidious about ingredients, softness and taste.”

(Translated by me)

The next style of new generation is bread shops which are fastidious about ingredients even though they follow the previous style. They sell some types of bread but types are restrained.

In Ashiya city, which is a prestigious residential area in Hyogo prefecture, Pan-Time Bread Shop collects popularity. The style of this shop is spreading into many bread shops of other prefectures by many bread craftsmen who imitate the bread of this shop. The character of this shop is unified with both of natural bread dough and Japanese traditional ingredients. This shop is fastidious about the bread dough which is made by natural yeast. Bread made by natural yeast isn’t soft but the flavor is so good. And this shop is fastidious about the recipes of the Japanese traditional ingredients. For example, craftsmen of this shop cook Japanese chestnuts by steaming. The texture of bread unified by both is new but kind of traditional for many Japanese people.

Japanese people say “pan” for bread. “Pan” is originated from the Portuguese language. This word was brought to Japan by Christian missionaries in the fifteenth century. Through six centuries, especially among the time after the World War II, the pan eating custom has taken root in Japan. And now, the Japanese people’s preference for bread is moving from that of people who can eat bread easily to that of people who want to enjoy the original taste of bread.

What has transferred the conventional bread to the new age is “kodawari” of bread craftsmen. Kodawari is similar to a kind of fastidiousness but it is kind of different from that emotion. The bread craftsmen in such shops noted above have some specific emotional attachment to make the extremely ideal bread that they imagine. And they sometimes express it as “one way”. So they make the same bread day by day in their one way without losing interest.

Is that behavior philosophical? Actually Gautama Buddha, the founder of Buddhism, said,” it is necessary for a practitioner to do the same practice everyday and to keep having the passion to do it everyday in order to lift himself to the field of enlightenment”. Of course my question is not correct, most bread craftsmen don’t know the upper teachings of Buddhism. Moreover the original Japanese meaning of “kodawari” is to “be obsessive”, then “kodawari” is different from the field of enlightenment, so that a bread craftsman with kodawari can be called a practitioner without philosophy. They may surely be out of Buddhism, nonetheless, they are the men who resolved their minds to do best.

If you eat new age bread at a bread shop with “kodawari”, you will enjoy a new texture.