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Why doesn’t every Japanese bakery sell this amazing anime-only bread we just made?【SoraKitchen】

Casey Baseel Aug 20, 2022
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Anime idols show us the light with this mouthwatering carb-on-carb spin on yakisoba bread.

There’s a lot of variety in the product lineup at Japanese bakeries and convenience store bread aisles, but you can always count on the perennial presence of yakisoba bread. Basically a hot dog bun filled with the saucy stir-fried noodles called yakisoba, yakisoba bread has been loved for generations, and is now one of the great pillars of the Japanese bread world, along with melon bread and curry bread.

▼ Yakisoba bread

And yet, something about this situation has been bothering our Japanese-language reporter Seiji Nakazawa. How come just about every bakery in Japan sells yakisoba bread, he wondered, but none of them sell carbonara bread?

As is so often the case, Seiji’s deep thoughts are an extension of his love of anime. During a recent rewatch of Love Live! Superstar!! Seiji was reminded of the character Kinako Sakurakoji’s love for carbonara bread, despite the fact that carbonara bread doesn’t exist in Japanese bakeries.

▼ Kinako shows up at the 25-second mark here.

Giving a character a funky fictional favorite food is a common ploy in anime to quickly establish a quirk for fans to latch on to, but the more Seiji thought about it, the less strange-sounding carbonara bread seemed. In fact, it stared to sound pretty good, and so he decided to try making it himself.

Luckily, Seiji is pretty handy in the kitchen, and so he boiled some noodles and whipped up a plate of carbonara pasta with some cream sauce, egg, cheese, and Parmesan cheese, plus garlic-sauteed bacon. He also added a tablespoon-and-a-half of vinegar, which is his own personal secret ingredient when making carbonara (or at least it was a secret until he decided to tell the whole world about it).

Next he took a bun, made a lengthwise incision…

…and stuffed it with pasta.

Stage 1 of the experiment was now complete, as Seiji had confirmed that it is, without a doubt, physically possible to make carbonara bread. It was now on to Stage 2, the question of whether or not you should make carbonara bread. After taking a bite, he thought he had the answer, but first impressions can be misleading, so he took one more, and then he knew, for sure, beyond a shadow of a doubt: Carbonara bread isn’t just good, it’s amazing, and even better than yakisoba bread, in his opinion.

In hindsight, it makes sense, since so many of the ingredients in carbonara work well as sandwich ingredients or bread spreads. Garlic bread and cheese bread are both great, as are sandwiches with bacon or eggs (in Japan, egg sandwiches are a whole food genre unto themselves, after all).

The biggest surprise, though, was how good the texture was. As tasty as yakisoba bread is, yakisoba noodles are pretty soft, so combined with a soft bun, it can be pretty mushy. Carbonara pasta, though, has a firmer feel to it, making for a more substantial and satisfying eating experience.

Seiji is absolutely certain that carbonara bread would be an instant hit, and that every bakery in Japan should start making it right away. Until they do, he’ll be making his own, and maybe for his next batch he should try applying the carbonara concept to this delicious technique for making yakisoba hot sandwiches.

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[ Read in Japanese ]