I just finished up two drawings; one is Cream Pan and the other is Curry Pan. You may be wondering “what the heck are those“?
Curry Pan
Cream Pan
Cream Pan is soft dough bread with Custard Cream inside. Curry Pan is a kind of doughnut that has curry inside. Both are Japanese relatively new inventions that are not as famous as Japanese traditional cuisine such as Sushi.
As these are mere representatives of Japanese baking culture; there are hundreds of others that you can only see in Japan, but not outside the country. I even say the number of kinds of products are far greater than Europe, the very region the Japanese learned the baking techniques from. Honestly some are very weird. There’s one other famous Japanese bread, which has the filling of red beans paste inside. I’ve seen one with fish cake inside as well. When it comes to bread, the Japanese never ceases to surprise customers. To think about it, this is a funny story because traditionally baking was never a choice of our meal. We hadn’t even heard of the word bread because rice had been our loyal companion until like 100 years ago.
another example of Japanese bread.
This one had fish egg on top and one whole boiled egg inside.
What happened was, the Japanese bakers of the early days realized that in order to get the people to eat the western bread, they need it to modify it, rather than preaching about its greatness and authenticity. Hence they came up with the bread with the weird but amazing twists. And now you may have realized the Japanese definition of bread(or Pan in Japanese) is a bit off. This is because we call regardless of the kind of the dough, we call anything whose ingredient wheat “bread“. Hence many of the Japanese bread are actually pastries or cakes, but we call them all “bread“. The curry pan that I talked about earlier is also called “Curry Bread(Pan)“
Although as we learned the baking techniques from the European countries so naturally it has a big influence, the baking culture of Japan is very unique, and the wide range of kinds of bread is nothing but the result of the early bakers efforts to get the people try the very different diet. Remember, Japanese traditional cuisine is nothing alike on this planet and we had never had bread! This is why they are so great!