The closest thing to milk bread in the U.S. is bland, shaggy-textured supermarket white bread we ate as kids. It’s not a far stretch. They both have soft and pillowy insides, very little crust, and an extremely mild but crowd-pleasing flavor. That said, they have one key difference: “Typically shokupan is far more enriched, meaning it contains more fat,” says Larissa Zhou, a food scientist who worked on Modernist Bread. In her research for the groundbreaking, five-volume, 2,500-page book, she found that shokupan had nearly seven times the fat—coming from either butter or milk or both—as regular white bread.
The Yamagata style at Stonemill Matcha.
Generally carbs in loaf-form arrived in Japan with the Dutch and Portuguese in the 16th century. Most Japanese households didn’t have ovens, so bread never stuck as an essential food. Instead, according to Eric Rath, a history professor at the University of Kansas and an author of a number of Japanese food history books, the Japanese considered bread a snack, which lead to a preference for sweeter bread, like the 1874 invention of adzuki bean–stuffed anpan.
Around World War II, we start seeing bread as a staple in Japan, mainly because rice became scarce and expensive just as American supplies of wheat and yeast were coming in. “When rice was rationed during wartime, there was an emphasis on making bread,” Rath explains to me. “There were even recipes for patriotic breads, made with seaweed and vegetables.” By the 1950s, bread took off as rice consumption went down by 50 percent and started replacing the usual rice served alongside soup or, say, a fried pork cutlet. But it wasn’t until the late 1970s that konbini, 24-hour Japanese convenience stores, started popping up and selling sandos as we know them today.
Rath and Sheng aren’t exactly sure when milk bread reached the States, but Sheng theorizes that it could have come with the birth of Japanese grocery stores like Mitsuwa in the late 1990s, followed by the arrival of Asian bakery chains like South Korea’s Paris Baguette and Taiwan’s 85 Degrees C in the early 2000s. With these places came their mass-produced versions of the flat, square milk bread that stayed perennially soft from dough conditioners and shortening. This was the milk bread I, along with many chefs and bakers I spoke to, grew up with. But it’s nothing like the kind of milk bread appearing on menus around the country right now.
