Shokupan

While we've long since used up most of the food that we bought when we went to Mitsuwa last, yesterday I saw sashagee take out the shokupan from the freezer. If you're not familiar, shokupan (食パン, literally "Meal bread") is a Japanese style of bread made with more milk than normal, leading to more fluffiness. When I extoled the virtues of shokupan to sashagee, she was a little skeptical--she grew up eating American white bread and just saw particularly thick slabs of that--but bought the bread. And when I saw it was unthawed, I had to have some:

The archetypal mouthful of toast.

If you've had mass-produced American white bread, you know it basically has no structure. It's held together pretty much by preservatives and subjected to the slightest amount of moisture or stress it collapses into mush or falls apart completely. Shokupan is not like that, it's chewy and toothsome while being sweeter than the dark rye I usually eat. It's delicious with butter and is such a part of Japanese home breakfast culture now that all my old adult students said they ate it, even Sunada-san, who owned a kimono store and met his wife through an お見合い omiai marriage-broker-arranged meeting.

I realize this post is a little like that "Thing: 😐, Thing, Japan: 😲" meme, but shokupan is really good. And having tried it and realizing how tasty it is, sashagee is now looking up recipes and thinking about how to make it, so I may yet end up late, running out the door with a mouthful of toast.