Shokupan Recipe

This is a soft, enriched white loaf. The original goal of this recipe was to produce a bread similar to the Raising Cane’s toast. This bread can be scaled and re-used in a lot of different ways. It’s great for rolls or buns.

Ingredient Requirements

• 350g bread flour
• 230g water
• 24g sugar
• 14g milk powder
• 7g salt
• 4g yeast
• 1 egg
• 20g butter
• Dough Conditioner¹

Quick Reference

Provided for repeat cooks who don’t need the explanations.

Yudane

• 100g bread flour
• 130g boiling water

Wet Mix

• 100g water
• 24g sugar
• 14g milk powder
• 7g salt
• 4g yeast
• 1 egg yolk (retain the white)

Final Mix

• Yudane
• 250g bread flour

Cooking

• 325F Convection or 350F Non-Convection
• 35 minutes for a loaf, 20 minutes for buns

Preparation

Yudane

• 100g bread flour
• 130g boiling water

Heat >130g of water in the microwave, and pour it over your pre-measured flour. Use a scale to make sure you pour in the right amount of water. Stir to combine, and then cover tightly. You will need to allow this to cool to around room temperature so it doesn’t harm anything in the final mix, at least less than 105 F.

The yudane is a Japanese breadmaking trick in which you over-hydrate some flour with boiling water. Flour’s ability to retain water is dependent on its temperature. So by adding boiling water to some of your flour, so you can make the flour retain more water than it normally would. This has the advantage of both making your bread more soft and fluffly, but also delaying stale-ing of the bread.

Wet Mix

• 100g water
• 24g sugar
• 14g milk powder
• 7g salt
• 4g yeast
• 1 egg yolk (retain the white)

NOTE: If you’re going to use this same recipe to make buns or really any enriched non-sandwhich loaf, only add the yolk to the dough, and retain the white for glazing. Technically the recipe only needs a yolk, but if you don’t have a plan for the white, just throw it in there. It’s also possible to just leave the egg out entirely, but it does reduce rise and hurts flavor a bit.

Mix all of the previous ingredients in your final mixing bowl. A whisk is the best choice for this, but if you have a frother on had, that works well too. You want the dry milk to reconstitute, the salt and sugar to dissolve, and have it all dispersed in the wet mix.

Yes milk powder tastes bad. Don’t worry about it. It’s a secret baking weapon that lets you get more milk per milk and makes stuff taste better. Don’t believe me? Try adding a tablespoon of milk powder to a brownie mix next time you make it. Instant upgrade. All of the bad milk powder flavors disappear in baking.

Once this is all mixed up, finish the mix:

Final Mix

• Yudane
• 250g bread flour

Don’t forget your yudane. Then add in your flour and knead. You’ll notice that we haven’t added the butter yet. That’s intentional. Butter will coat the flour in fat molecules, preventing gluten formation. This would lead to either:

• You having to do a lot more kneading to get it to the right state (which is a waste of your time).
• Your loaf will seem perfectly fine and then will deflate like a sad balloon after cooking. Nobody wants deflated bread.

Once the dough has been kneaded to the point where you can pull it and it starts to pull back into its original shape, it’s time to add the butter. Just a little bit at a time, until it is fully incorporated. Adding too much fat at once can cause your dough ball to break, making an absolute mess of things. Just go at it slowly until it’s all incorporated.

In reality, I tend to knead until the dough is homogenous, then start adding butter. Once all of the butter has been incorporated, you can just keep kneading until it re-forms a cohesive ball. It will be really sticky due to all of the good stuff in it.

Bulk Fermentation / 1st Proof

Cover and allow loaf to rise to doubled in size. Err on the low side here. Instant yeast can be tempermental, but it’s not a disaster if you don’t get to it. I’ve had a dough quadruple in size in this phase and it’s still come out fine thanks to some careful later steps. This step can take anywhere from 45 minutes to 1.5 hours, usually. But depends heavily on the temperature of your dough and your kitchen.

Shaping

Make sure to place some parchment paper into the vessel you plan on cooking in. That will make it much easier to remove later.

Flour the top of the dough and your work surface. Give your dough a good press to collapse all of the air bubbles. It doesn’t have to be aggressive. We just want to redistribute the yeast and prevent any abnormally big bubbles from forming and making voids in the final product. Dump the loaf out onto your work surface.

For a loaf, split the dough into three equal weight pieces. Flatten them out into a rectangle with the short side about as wide as the short side of your loaf tin. Starting from a short end, roll the dough up into a big roll and place into the loaf pan to create three adjacent rolls. Lightly press down the three rolls into the pan, so it fills in the space. This will encourage the dough to rise to fill the container before moving upward, giving it a more consistent shape.

For hamburger buns, split the dough into six equal weight pieces. Flatten them out into a rough shape. Then fold the outside into the inside, rotating by about 30 degrees and folding in again. Your objective is to end up with a roughly circular shape after you’ve folded and rotated around the whole dough cutout. Once that’s done, flip it over so the seam side is down, and place into your baking vessel. For buns, I typically use a high sided 9 x 13 pan (or slightly smaller, if you can find one) as the shape of the vessel will help make sure the buns rise correctly. If you’re having trouble with the shape of your buns, try looking more into bun shaping to help encourage a better shape.

Cover your dough for the final proof.

Final Proofing

Allow your dough to double in size. This is really 100% by feel and will take experiementation to get a feel for. Let it go for what you feel is too long once and see what happens. But when you feel that your dough is getting close, preheat your oven and remove any racks that would prevent you from cooking in the middle of the oven.

A good tell for if your dough is prooved enough is by how readily is springs back when you lighly push your finger into it. If it springs back readily, its not prooved enough. If it takes a bit to come back, it’s about right. If it doesn’t come back, or comes back extremely slowly, it’s over-prooved.

Cooking

325F Convection, or 350F Non-Convection. 35 minutes for a loaf, 20 minutes for buns.

Quickly shove that bad boy in the oven and let it go. After the required time (or once reached desired outside done-ness), remove from oven and quickly remove the dough from the tin or baking vessel to rest on a wire rack. Make sure to remove parchment paper.

Final Notes

For a bun recipe, I adjust the total to:

• 300g bread flour
• 185g water
• 240g sugar
• 12g milk powder
• 6g salt
• 4g yeast
• 1 egg
• 20g butter

With the yudane being:

• 50g bread flour
• 75g boiling water

This makes 6 good sized buns when split evenly by weight.

Resources

• Dreams of Dashi - Shokupan - The original recipe that I started with when making Shokupan.
• Chain Baker - How to Make Super Soft Burger Buns | Yudane Method - Provided heavy inspiration for the current version of this recipe.