Rice cooker bread at home!

Is anyone up for baking some bread this weekend? Here I have a recipe that allows you to bake a basic loaf of bread without an oven or fancy bread machine!

Adapted from “Yakitate!! Japan”, a Japanese Anime/Manga series that revolves around the theme of bread making. In the series, the protagonist Azuma Kazuma, a young boy, has the dream of creating a bread (“Pan” is Japanese for bread) that is distinctively Ja”Pan”. His breads are numbered according to when he has created it. The Rice-cooker bread, aka Japan no. 2, was created when he was 6, and sure enough, it is an easy enough recipe to follow.

Please note that the whole process will take almost 5 1/2 hours to complete.

List of Ingredients:

350g Bread Flour (Have an extra 50g on the side to stiffen the dough if it is too sticky)

21g Sugar

5g Dry Yeast (+1 tbs warm water)

2 tsp Salt

180ml Warm Water

35ml Milk

20g Butter (soften)

Step 1: Put all the ingredients into the bowl and start kneading. I would recommend using just 1 hand as it gets sticky and messy really quickly.

Step 2: Knead for at least a few minutes. If it is still too sticky, add the extra 50g of flour, a little at a time till it becomes smooth, stretchy, and it stops trying to attach itself to everything you own.

Step 3: Cover with a damp cloth and set aside in a warm place for 1 hour to rise.

Step 4: After an hour, lift the dough out of the bowl and drop it back into the bowl, and let it rise again for 1 hour.

Step 5: on to the baking stage. This is the easy bit. Put it into the rice cooker, hit start and wait. This will take approximately 1 hour.

Step 6: Flip the bread over, and hit start again. When that is done, flip it over again and hit start. There will be a total of 3 “start” and 2 flipping before it is ready.

You are done! Now to slice it up and enjoy! I prefer it with something sweet, like Kaya (coconut jam).

Time to get all fancy with the truffle butter.

Here is the video clip of the Anime portion.

Enjoy!

Update: 19 Nov 2014 – my 2nd attempt. This time round, I kneaded the dough for much longer the 1st time, and was careful with letting the bread rise, and using warm water, and it turned out a lot lighter than the 1st time.

I unfortunately did forget to remove to let cool on a wire rack when it was done (it was 4am by the time I was done, started at 10pm) and the crust wasn’t as thick and crusty as the 1st time.

For my other rice-cooker recipes:

Matcha “pan” cakes (green-tea rice cooker pancake)