Thursday, July 19, 2007

Japan #2 Fiasco - Part 1

So. This story starts with me watching anime.

There was this one episode of Yakitate Japan where Azuma shows you how to make bread (namely Japan #2). The neat part of the bread is that it's baked in a rice cooker. In the show they describe the bread as "fluffy, fluffy, fluffy" and "so easy that even the producers can make it." Judging by this: I suck...

So I started by making the dough. Here's the recipe translated to American units (roughly).

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  • 3 Cups Bread Flour
  • 4 tsp Butter
  • 5 tsp Sugar
  • 7 tsp Milk
  • 3/4 Cup Water
  • 2 tsp Dry Yeast
  • 1 tsp Salt
  1. Add to rice cooker: flour, sugar, salt, yeast dissolved in water, water, milk. Knead
  2. Add butter. Knead
  3. After you've kneaded it enough that it sops being sticky, let it sit somewhere warm for 1 hr (first fermentation).
  4. Drop the dough from about 2 feet to get rid of the gas. Thn, let it sit somewhere warm for 1 hr (second fermentation).
  5. Bake it for 1 hr in the rice cooker.
  6. Flip it, and bake it for 1 hr.
  7. Flip it and bake it for 1 hr.
  8. Eat.
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Ao things were going well for a while.

I made the dough...
I let it sit...
It fermented...And then things went downhill from there. I started baking it and took my evening nap. Then I woke up to see that the rice cooker was all steamed up and the bread was smelling breadish. "Good," I thought. I was wrong, but that is a story for another post. Or probably more than just one more - this is a long story.

1 comment:

EriD said...

I've never seen anything about making bread in the rice bucket part of a rice cooker, but I've used my rice cooker's steamer tray to make steamed buns. They're pretty good.
http://www.recipesource.com/ethnic/asia/chinese/00/rec0031.html