I’m not an especially precise person in the kitchen. Baking, of course, requires a certain amount of precision that this former chemistry major1 can handle, but when it comes to exacting ornamentation or more than a couple even cuts in sequence, I’m far from a pro. This is why my food often looks… the way it does.
To be fair, I don’t generally consider this to be a deficiency. I like things to have a little bit of character, whether it be an irregular ceramic bowl in a set or the occasional oblong cookie in a batch. With that being said… the oft glamorized Japanese milk bread sandwich is a real testament to the power of precision. Maybe attention to detail is a better term than precision — it’s not so much that every sandwich is prepared identically, but that the elegant removal of crust, careful alignment of fruit, and intentional distribution of spreads can make a sandwich comprised of relatively humble ingredients into something people (literally) write home about.
I’m really trying to dot my i’s and cross my t’s as I prepare for Café Cremi vol. II, so nailing down the headliner sandwiches was the main thing I wanted to accomplish this week. I have drinks squared away, and at least one of the two hot items should be pretty straight forward.
At Tsutaya Books (aka design / art book paradise, although not all locations are created equal), I stumbled upon these egg and fruit sando books by Yui Nagata on my first or second day in Tokyo. I knew I’d be coming back for them, as gratuitous as acquiring not one but two books about white bread sandwich assembly seems. The designer in me appreciated the typological approach to sandwich construction — it’s very visually academic, if you know what I mean.
Before getting into sandwiches, we have to talk about milk bread. The rather detailed JOC shokupan recipe was the first I tried, and it turned out quite well. It’s not an especially difficult recipe, but it is a brioche-level amount of work, the hallmark of which is holding on to my stand mixer for dear life as it flails around my countertop with reckless abandon. I got a nice and sturdy made-in-Japan pullman loaf pan, which is of notably different dimensions than the typical American pullman. There is something striking about a perfectly rectangular loaf of bread, something perversely defiant of the laws of baking physics. It was pretty easy to cut evenly, although I lost a couple of pieces at the end. Hopefully it keeps / revives from frozen well, we’ll see in the next couple of days. Notably, this recipe doesn’t use the customary yudane. Since I can’t seem to leave well enough alone, I’ll probably test another variation out to see if I observe a meaningful difference in the texture of the end product.
On to the fillings. No huge twist on the tamago, I tweaked a recipe from the book that involves marinating the eggs in a dashi, soy, mirin situation to add a nice depth of flavor. I need to try it again, or maybe rework the left over egg salad and do another tasting — perhaps more mayo? Or maybe I just need to slather a bit more onto the sandwich.
With the strawberry I opted for a cream & custard composition, the style I enjoyed most in Japan, adding my signature (???) twist of rosewater in the whipped cream. I used some kind of droopy Hood strawberries that were laying around, so on game day I’ll probably have something a little bigger / less sweet on hand. I haven’t made a creme pat in a long time, it was a little thick but that’s easy enough to fix. Taste wise these were great, a little less sweet than I expected, so I might add a touch more sugar to the whip, but otherwise no real notes.
I’m am still thinking about how to cut them; one of the things I enjoy most about the book is the plethora of berry layout schematics it presents. I opted for thirds here, but I really think the diagonally halved sandwiches eat in a significantly different way. However, thirds simplifies the task of making enough of these things for everyone to try… I might even be able to push to quarters if they don’t seem too small. Whatever I choose, I want to try and get away with only baking two 1.5 kin loaves total, if I can help it.
Lastly, to figure out just how much of this I can do in advance, I popped a third of each sandwich in the fridge to see how they hold up overnight. Since I’ll also being making a few hot dishes, the most I want to do the day of is assemble and cut, but think I can probably get away with completely finishing the egg sandwich the night before.
R
Lol, so briefly it almost doesn’t even count — chemistry becomes physics FAST