Rice ball melon bread – A treat Japanese bakeries aren't crazy enough to make, but we are【SoraKitchen】
Melon bread is one of Japan's greatest creations in the field of baked goods. Despite the name, it doesn't really contain any melon. Instead, melon bread is a half-spherical bun with a slightly crisp, sugar-dusted cookie crust and softer, fluffier bread underneath. Sweet but not too sweat, filling but not too filling, melon bread is so loved that it's available in just about every convenience store and supermarket in Japan, but we recently learned that melon bread's cookie dough crust is pretty easy to make yourself at home.
Our Japanese-language reporter Ikuna Kamezawa has been exploring the vast array of possibilities this knowledge presents us with. She recently decided to see what other types of bread cores can be given the melon bread crust treatment, and emboldened by her success, another question popped into her head: If melon bread rust can make bread more delicious, can it do the same for other types of carbohydrates too?
To find out, Ikuna rushed out to our local branch of convenience store chain Lawson, coming back with an onigiri (rice ball), mochi, and ramen, all of which she was going to augment by encasing in melon bread.
After preparing a fresh batch of melon bread crust dough (following the process here), Ikuna rolled out three pieces, one for each of her test subjects. For her rice ball, Ikuna had selected one with an ume (pickled plum) filling, and she placed it in the center of a piece of dough, then pulled up the sides for a neatly folded triangle.
▼ Melon bread gets its name from the grid pattern bakers make in the dough, which resembles the outer skin of a melon.
For her mochi test, Ikuna had originally been planning to use a standard rice cake. The more she thought about this, though, the more she felt like the stiffness mochi acquires after its initial cooking and cooling would make for an unpleasant mouthfeel underneath a melon bread coating. So at the last second, she changed her mind and decided to use warabimochi, a jiggly, gelatin-like mochi, instead. Unlike regular mochi, warabimochi is eaten as a dessert, and the pack Ikuna picked up was dusted with kinako (roasted soybean powder), meaning that her warabimochi melon bread was going to be a combination of one sweet snack inside of another, so she had a lot of confidence in this pairing.
And finally, for the ramen, Ikuna selected Lawson's Rich and Filling Pork Raman, which was like the most flavorful-sounding of the ramen varieties they had on offer.
Unlike the rice ball and warabimochi, the ramen needed to be cooked before its melon bread wrapping. After getting it out of the microwave and giving it a good stir, Ikuna used her chopsticks to transfer noodles and a slice of chashu roast pork to the melon bread dough.
With the prep work done, now it was time to pop the trio into the oven to bake at 180 degrees Celsius (356 degrees Fahrenheit) for 15 minutes.
When Ikuna pulled the tray back out of the oven, she was happy to see that the rice ball melon bread had cooked up beautifully. The rice ball and ramen melon breads, though, had a few cracks.
Actually, maybe it'd be more accurate to call the warabimochi melon bread ruptured, since some of the filling had bubbled up through the crust during cooking.
That said, none of them looked bad, and they looked even better in cross section! From this angle, Ikuna's rice ball melon bread looks like it could be an official professionally produced product…
…and the warabimochi and ramen melon breads had a rustic, homemade charm to their aesthetics.
Rather than take the first bites herself, Ikuna once again assembled a taste-testing panel, made up of fellow reporters Seiji Nakazawa, Mr. Sato, and P.K. Sanjun.
▼ And no, SoraNews24 doesn't have a black T-shirt dress code, they just all happened to coincidentally coordinate on this day in the office.
Considering how well Ikuna's previous batch of melon bread breads had gone over with them, Ikuna inwardly smiled as she expected similar praise for her newest innovations. After tasting them all, it was P.K. who spoke first:
'The warabimochi one feels like some trendy type of experimental melon bread, so it's pretty good…The others are awful.'
Next came Mr. Sato's comments:
'I guess the warabimochi melon bread isn't too bad. The others are awful, especially the ramen melon bread…If this a cruel joke, I'm not laughing.'
And finally, from Seiji:
'It'd take me about an hour to fully express how bad these are.'
▼ Ikuna's dreams were as shattered as the divvied up melon bread.
Crestfallen but curious, now it was Ikuna's turn to taste her criticized creations, in order to see how things had gone wrong.
The warabimocih melon bread really wasn't half-bad. She hadn't expected the mochi to liquify to this extent, but the sweet gooiness has a certain charm to it. However, Ikuna can't honestly say that her warabimochi melon bread tastes better than regular warabmochi or melon bread do by themselves, so there's not much incentive to go to the trouble of combining them.
As for the rice ball melon bread, as soon as she took a bite Ikuna realized she'd made a major mistake by using a rice ball with a pickled plum filling. Japanese pickled plums, called umeboshi, are very sour. That sharp taste clashes harshly with the gentle sweetness of melon bread crust, and since pickled plums have a sort of liquidity to their outer layer, that flavor seeps out beyond just the center of the rice ball. Taking a careful nibble so that she could taste a portion with no plum flavor, Oona found the taste of her rice ball melon bread greatly improved. She's still not sure if making rice ball melon bread with a different filling, or maybe even no filling at all, would be good, but it definitely would be better than the plum-filling one she had here.
The tasting panel had been unanimous in heaping their biggest complaints on the ramen melon bread, and here too Ikuna could understand their sentiments right away after trying a bite herself. As mentioned above, she'd tried to pick out the most flavorful ramen she could, but she neglected to take into account that when you're eating ramen, you're really not getting much flavor at all from the noodles themselves. It's the broth that lights up your flavor receptors, and while some of its taste gets soaked into the noodles, once you take them out of the broth and bake them, the broth's flavor largely disappears, so the ramen melon bread turned out bland and unappealing. Come to think of it, for yakisoba bread, a Japanese bakery staple in which stir-fried ramen noodles are placed inside a bun like the kind used for a hot dog, the noodles' sauce (which is thicker than ramen broth) is always included in the list of ingredients, which is probably why it doesn't have the problematically lacking flavor that Ikuna's ramen melon bread did.
So in the end, Ikuna feels like she owes her coworkers, and melon bread itself, and apology, since in hindsight there were issues she failed to notice at the concept stage. She's not giving up just yet, though, and even as we speak she's scheming up new things to try putting in melon bread for a future taste test.
Photos ©SoraNews24
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