20 Percent Rye Sourdough Shokupan Sandwich Bread

Jul 8, 2024

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by

Hellen

in Baking & Desserts, Bread, Recipes, Sourdough

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A soft, shreddy shokupan (Japanese sandwich bread) recipe using sourdough starter and a rye flour yudane.

I made Benito’s Mochi Sourdough Hokkaido Milk Bread the other day and was greatly impressed with the recipe. The crumb was so very soft. This recipe is adapted from the Mochi Sourdough Hokkaido Milk Bread recipe linked above, with the following changes:

I used more starter in the stiff sweet starter/levain, and modified the ratio of flour and water to account for this
I used water instead of milk in the yudane so that I could pour boiled water directly from my kettle into a bowl on top of a scale. This saves some effort and washing.
I made the yudane the same time as the stiff sweet starter and let it rest overnight so that the enzymes had more time to work.
I decreased the salt slightly because I only had salted butter
I did not eggwash the loaf.
I baked at 355 degrees instead of 350 degrees F for 50 minutes, and skipped the extra 10 minute baking time out of the tin. There was no major reason for this other than to cut down on steps and avoid crumbs in the oven.

Because I previously had issues with shaping shokupan, I also detail additional instructions for rolling and shaping the loaf in my recipe card below.

Why this recipe works

Compared to other shokupan recipes, this recipe is notable in two ways:

It uses a stiff sweet starter.
It uses a 1:2 yudane.

Stiff sweet starter

Because of the low moisture and high starch content, stiff sweet starters are often more suitable for enriched breads like shokupan than other wetter levains or starters.

Stiff sweet starters also have the advantage of imparting less tang into the final loaf, making them suitable for shokupan and other enriched breads like sweet rolls or brioche.

Here is another sourdough shokupan recipe I have tried and can recommend which uses a stiff sweet starter from What to Cook Today.

1:2 yudane

I’ve outlined in a previous recipe post on why a 1:1 of 1:2 ratio of flour to water for yudane may be more ideal than a higher hydration yudane or tangzhong.

For this 20% rye shokupan recipe, all of the rye flour in the recipe is in the yudane. Rye flour is scalded with boiling water, left to cool, and then incorporated into the final dough. The gelatinization that results from the scalding has the effect of making the final dough easier to work with.

Troubleshooting

I have made variations of this loaf several times now and the two most important factors for success are gluten development and appropriate proofing.

Gluten development only requires patience and is easy to achieve if you have a stand mixer or dough mixer. It is also measurable via the windowpane test.

Overproofing, on the other hand, is an easy pitfall. The hope of maximizing height and fluffiness of the loaf coupled with timing constraints often leads to overproofing. How often have I left an underproofed loaf to run errands or go train only to return later to find it overproofed?

Due to enrichments and rye flour, this dough is much less forgiving than some other doughs to overproofing. An overproofed rye shokupan loaf will collapse and sink in the oven, sometimes having a concave top. It will also lack the fluffy interior we are after.

If your starter is not particularly strong and your stiff sweet starter is taking a long time to triple, you can – with caution – add 1-2 grams of instant yeast when making the final dough.

Since shokupan is so particular, it is a good idea to plan ahead. This will be easier to do if you can control your proofing temperature. For those of us less equipped, proofing is something to keep a close eye on.

Can I increase the rye flour?

The more rye flour and less bread flour there is, the harder it will be to achieve the shreddy, soft crumb which shokupan is famous for.

As noted above, all of the rye flour in this 20% rye shokupan recipe goes in the yudane. There is no additional rye flour in the final dough mixture or the stiff sweet starter because rye flour does not have enough gluten. The less gluten there is, the less shreddy the final crumb will be.

Because I love rye and I prefer whole grains to white breads, I have been trying to develop a shokupan recipe with a higher percentage of rye. In my last attempt, I increased the yudane flour amount to 25%. I also used rye flour in the stiff sweet starter. Together, this added to a 42.6% composition of rye flour. The dough mixed up okay but could not rise as high as the 20% rye flour shokupan. In fact, I was expecting it to rise a bit higher and as a result overproofed the dough.

More importantly, I was not happy with the resulting crumb. This was probably a result of overproofing combined with less gluten from the increased rye flour. The crumb, while not terrible, was far from the shreddy texture pictured in this blog post. And a shreddable crumb is essential to a good shokupan!

That’s not to say it’s impossible to increase the rye percentage while retaining the shreddy shokupan texture. While I have not tested this yet, perhaps adding some vital wheat gluten to the dough will fix these problems…

Note on nomenclature

Hokkaido milk bread and shokupan is often used interchangeably to refer to Japanese style sandwich bread.

I prefer calling Japanese sandwich bread shokupan because it is the more accurate term. Sometimes a shokupan recipe may not feature milk. This recipe for 20% rye shokupan for instance, only has a minimal amount of milk. Furthermore, this type of bread – shokupan- neither originated from Hokkaido nor necessarily uses Hokkaido milk.

As an aside, shokupan like breads (square white bread, often made with milk) exist in other countries and are not called “shokupan”. For instance, this type of bread can be found in various Asian (Chinese, Taiwanese, Korean) bakeries. You will likely find similarly soft, square sandwich breads at your local Chinatown bakeries. In Chinese, they are sometimes called fang bao (方包 – literally “square bread”).

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