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Rice Cooker Bread: Ja-Pan #2 December 2, 2006

Posted by thelazychef in Bread. 11 comments

I’m back! I’m back! I’m back! Weeeeeeee!

Haha… Sorry for the over excitement… But I miss baking and cooking so much!!!

And yes, for my very 1st bake: Bread ‘baked’ in a rice cooker!

Someone in the forum that I frequent(KC), introduced us to this clip which shows how bread can be made in a rice cooker! And I told the fellow people that I’ll give this a try once my exams are over!

Some background on how this bread was created.

There is a popular anime series in Japan called “Yakitake!! Japan”. Yakitake means ‘freshly baked’ in Japanese and well, Japan has a double meaning: first being Japan as a country, and Pan is the Japanese translation of ‘bread’. The anime’s story is about a boy called Kazuma Azuma who posessed solar hands and is a prodigy at baking bread(because the yeast thrive very well in his warm hands, allowing his bread to rise faster).

Ja-Pan#2(yes, he names all his bread ‘Ja-Pan #X’ where X is the number) is one of the bread that he creates using a rice cooker.

I was rather intrigued when I first read about and watched the clip and since I had a modern rice cooker, I thought it would be a good experiment to take on!

This is a very simple recipe however it is very time consuming(took me 5 and 1/2 hours!), so I’d advice that you make this only if you’re very free(like me now! hahaha!). And you MUST have a modern rice cooker to bake this.

When I say modern, I mean this:

And NOT this:

Why the modern type? Because it has a timer capability that allows one to set the timer. Also, they come with a micro-computer that adjust a constant temperature while you cook your rice, porriage, slow-cook etc… For the older types, all they have is one button that you press down when you want to cook your rice.

This bread had a mellow, a slight salty taste to it and was a lil’ chewy. I guess this must be due to the fact that Japanese like chewy and sticky food, like their mochi and rice… I feel that the butter and milk both made this bread very fragrant and enhanced the taste of the bread.

So, for those of you who have a modern rice cooker, you can consider making this interesting bread… It’s quite easy and shouldn’t be that difficult to follow…

(haha… I’m very tempted to skip writing out the recipe, but I shall be nice… :P)

What you need:
350g Bread Flour
21g Butter
21g Sugar
35ml Milk
180ml Water
5g Dry Yeast
6.5g Salt

(As you can tell from the video, they said that an important step in making bread is in the measurements, so I would suggest using a digital scale to measure out the ingredients.)

What to do:(Nothing beats watching the video on how to do it. So, watch it!)
1. Mix some warm water with the yeast and put aside.
2. Put in the remaining ingredients, except the butter.
3. Mix and knead until all the ingredients combine together and you can shape it into a ball.
4. Take the ball of dough and put the butter into the centre of the dough. Knead the butter into the dough until it combines together and the dough becomes less oily and less sticky. Shape into a ball shape again.
5. Leave the dough in the rice cooker pot and cover with a cloth, let it rise for an hour in a warm area(primary fermentation).
6. After an hour, lift the dough and drop it from a height of 50cm to release the air trapped inside the dough. (DO NOT punch the dough, they were very adamant about it in the video!)
7. Put it back into the pot, cover and let it rise again for another hour(secondary fermentation).
8. Put pot with risen dough into the rice cooker, set timer for 1 hour.
9. After it finishes the 1st cycle, turn it over using a spatula. Start the 2nd cycle of 1 hour.
10. After the 2nd cycle, turn it over again. Start the last and final cycle(weee!)
11. When the 3rd cycle has completed, remove the bread and leave it on a wire rack to cool.

Enjoy!

Notes:
1. I poured out 180ml of warm water and used part of it to mix the yeast, because I read somewhere that someone had problems with a sticky dough, so I didn’t want to add too much water.
2. In the final cycle, I would suggest that you check on your rice cooker because for my case, the thermostat kept shortening the overall cooking time because the rice cooker was hot inside and didn’t need the time to heat up the food that was inside.
3. Be prepared to wait a long time while this bread is being baked. I guess its good in a way, just knead the dough, dump it aside, go do your other chores, come back after an hour, check on it, then go back and do your chores, then throw it into the rice cooker and just check on it every hour. For me, I was playing this game, Cake Mania(cos I like to bake mah!), while waiting it out… haha… very fun, and a good time waster…