Japanese bread and hunks of foreign cheese

Japan is the land of cotton-candy bread. From corner stores to high-end bakeries, bright white bread reigns supreme. It’s a sandwich staple from Hokkaido to Okinawa and found in every Japanese household I entered during the year I lived in Kyushu. Sometimes it’s thick, sometimes thin and you occasionally see a version with non-bleached flour and therefore slightly off-white. It is utterly soft and completely benign. The texture is so consistent, sans holes or irregularities, that I can only imagine the modern-day version of Lucille Ball’s chocolate-factory gal yanking out the slices that aren’t completely perfect. Imagine a Pullman bread with no yeasty taste and a soft crust and you pretty much have it.

The first couple of times I visited Japan, in college, that bread tasted delicious to me. Toasted with butter, it was scrumptious. But the best of its kind came after a long wait in the food hall of one of Tokyo’s fancy department stores at Fauchon bakery. My friend Miho and I queued up with dozens of other women—young workers and older matronly types—to buy a loaf of hot fresh white bread. I believe each customer could only purchae a single loaf, so Miho and I paid for two and hightailed it to a bench, somewhere just outside the store. We devoured at least three-quarters of one of the loaves in about five minutes. Nothing, I repeat nothing, is better than fresh warm bread.

Once I moved to Nagasaki prefecture to teach English, I soon realized that my trips to Tokyo to visit Miho’s family (we met at college in the States) were not at all representative of what I would find in Nagasaki. Indeed, the Japan I knew was one where the locals didn’t sneer at foreigners or bother if a single woman ate dinner by herself in a restaurant. Most of those findings are for another post (or blog), but the other thing I realized is that I wasn’t so fond of that darn white bread known as pan, after the French word for bread, pain.

I had been raised on a steady diet of bagels, bialys and rye bread for most of my life, products so dense that when over-toasted, a great deal of butter-knife force was often needed to spread the goods. These are tough breads that could crack a tooth under the right conditions. My guess is that I was attracted to the Japanese white bread as “other.” It was oddly different, exotic.

About three months into my time in Imabuku, a little fishing village on the Sea of Japan, my Kiwi friend Pip and I joined a food cooperative called the Foreign Buyers Club. We joined the club expressly to buy cheese, as the dairy situation in Japan was dire. The only hard or strong cheese to be found in Nagasaki was imported and came in tiny quantities at exorbitant prices. Pip and I ordered kilo-size blocks of cheddar and Swiss that we split in half. It was a lot of cheese, but Pip usually blew through hers in a couple of weeks. I rationed my portion so it would last at least six weeks. I used a sharp knife or vegetable peeler to shave the hunk and carefully wrapped the brick it in plastic so that it was only exposed to air for a few seconds at a time.

The morning ritual was my favorite. Two or three days a week, I would toast that white bread once and then carefully butter it. It was easy to rip the bread, especially if the butter was cold, so I often removed the butter from my little fridge before I showered so it had time to get close to room temperature. I would then take a few slivers from the cheese hunk, place them on the toast and then put it back in the toaster over for another round, until it was all bubbly and brown and melty.

But that white bread, after a time, just wasn’t satisfying. I wanted something that needed to be chewed with incisors, not gummed and swallowed. I would have paid a lot of yen for a hardy wheat, pumpernickel or crusty baguette.

I would have paid a lot of yen for this almost no-knead bread from the December ’07 issue of Cook’s Illustrated. Yeasty with a touch of tang, it knocked my socks off. The Cook’s staff made a few modifications to Mark Bittman’s now-famous no-knead bread recipe that appeared in the Times last year which. That bread, it turns out, has a bit too much water in it. I’m no baker and tend to be intimidated by yeast, but this recipe is so easy and so delicious, you truly won’t believe it.

If I had known how to make this bread in Japan, it’s very possible it would have saved me and all my friends from the achy-breaky Kyushu blues, from which we all suffered mightily.