So long, sourdough. I’m a sando man now

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Just like everyone else, I spent most of lockdown improving my sourdough game. It’s not like I really needed to. I own a bakery, so most mornings I can hop on my bike and get one made by a professional as it comes out of the oven. But I found myself buying into all the woo-woo about working harmoniously with the natural ferment, the holy mystery of “The Mother” and the uterine power of the oven giving life to my creation.

It got so I could make ’em big and airy, so sour your face would pucker and with artistically cut dark-brown crusts so sharp they’d lacerate your cheeks. But I had a filthy, shameful secret. I pined for white, sliced packet bread. I realise I’m going to get my “Middle Class Licence to Practise” revoked for this, but the more sublime my sourdough became, the more I yearned for the stuff I’d had as a kid. Maybe nothing quite as debased as the preservative-choked zombie loaf in the supermarkets, but at least the mass-produced white sliced ubiquitous in my childhood.

I wanted it so badly it hurt. Then I found out that the Japanese were ahead of me again: I started hearing about shokupan. Shokupan, or the slightly sweeter version called Hokkaido milk bread, is the favourite sandwich loaf of Japan. It’s made in a similar way to regular white bread, but enriched with egg and powdered milk. Though it uses yeast, it’s based on a tangzhong, a sort of cooked roux. It’s an unusual process for most western breadmakers. It creates, without additives, a dough that can hold a lot of gas during cooking, becoming fluffy without getting chewy. In fact, it makes a loaf that has all the cues of the baleful Chorleywood process (the method by which the majority of industrial sliced loaves are made) but with entirely natural ingredients.

It was always destined, I suppose, to become a red-hot trend. My social feeds are plump with the stuff. California is reported to be waist-deep in fluffy white loaves. Now a handful of UK outlets — among them Happy Sky bakery in west London, and Shokupan, which opens in Birmingham next month and seems itching to franchise across the country — are serving sandos, the spectacularly Insta-genic sandwiches made with perfectly sliced shokupan and neat layers of filling as thick as the bread. My inbox groans with earnest young start-ups, offering “artisanal shokupan” for roughly the price of a small car.

Bread is thought to have been introduced to Japan by the Portuguese in the mid-16th century (the Japanese pan comes from the Portuguese pão) but it remained an oddity until the Meiji period (1868—1912), when bakers near naval ports began making double-cooked bread to provision ships, and the process quickly industrialised. Shokupan — literally “eating bread” — came into being after the second world war, when the US began supplying large quantities of wheat and powdered milk as aid to a nation that had hitherto built most of its diet around rice. (I recommend Barak Kushner’s wonderful book Slurp for the story of how this also led to the international cultural phenomenon of ramen.)

Shokupan is so much part of the childhood of Japanese food lovers that they have the same nostalgia for it as we have for the loaves of our youths. They have elevated shokupan to their own extraordinary food pantheon. It is certainly associated with yoshuku, the trend in Japanese cooking to adapt western recipes. In 2019, Mitsubishi launched a remarkable high-tech toaster, which closes entirely around a single standard slice of shokupan and toasts it to rigorous perfection, keeping track of colour, temperature and humidity in the chamber using an array of sensors. You can own one of these astonishing objects for a mere £230.

There is something enchanting about the combination of love and respect for food and complete perfectionism that has made the Japanese not only embrace western, industrialised commodity bread, but honour it, improve on it and invent a machine that will create a single slice of supreme toast from it.

There is also something utterly inevitable about our own culinary hipsters, gleefully following any Japanese lead. We have seen ramen grow so fast around the globe that, like the hamburger and the pizza, its origin story is almost irrelevant. In the UK, we’ve seen how Japanese “curry” has brought a little chunk of our own colonial past in a giant circle back to our own doorstep. The shokupan tale is outrageously complicated even by those standards.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m the first in the queue for it. After all, I am the man who recently drove halfway across the damn country to a Birmingham shopping mall in search of a white-bread egg sandwich. As I ate my excellent tamago sando (at an unscheduled, one-man-only preview of Shokupan before it opens next month), I found myself forced to consider some of my life choices. You couldn’t get me to eat a regular supermarket sliced-white egg sandwich at gunpoint, yet here I was chasing a full Proustian trip via a millennial reinterpretation of a Japanese reproduction of a product of Victorian British industrialisation. A piece, arguably, of my own cultural history, that might have been invented in a city like Birmingham, to feed workers in the factories they bulldozed to build the shopping centre that houses Shokupan. A product that was exported, forced on another culture by war, roundly rejected here, improved and then sold back to me by internet-mediated global youth-culture.

Sometimes, I swear to God, this job is enough to make your brain hurt.

Follow Tim on Twitter @TimHayward and email him at [email protected]

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