It’s so popular that scalpers want a piece of the action.
Japanese Milk Bread, by Jennifer Perillo (The Spruce Eats)
Homemade bread is wonderful, but doesn’t always maintain that soft, fresh-from-the-oven taste and texture the next day. This recipe for Japanese milk bread, however, tastes as though it was just baked. It is a springy, airy white bread that gets its signature texture from a roux starter called tangzhong.
Restaurants throughout America are embracing fluffy white shokupan, but as you might imagine, California is where the current hysteria originates.
LA’s ‘orgasmic’ $18 Japanese milk bread sells out in seconds every day, by Lori Beckett (The Guardian)
Ginza Nishikawa opened in Santa Monica this summer. It offers a single product, its $18 bread, and customers have told Okubo they have driven from as far as San Francisco and San Diego to get it. The milk bread is popular enough that scalpers have been reselling the loaves on the Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu for $22 to $33, Eater Los Angeles reported, prompting complaints from other customers, who say paying $18 should be enough.
Okubu said her decision to bring Ginza Nishikawa to California was inspired by seeing a white bread gap in the US market. Offerings have long been dominated by cheap supermarket brands, even as Americans have embraced homemade sourdough and other artisan breads. “Having eaten Wonder Bread as a child, I just knew the level of the white bread is not very high in the US,” Okubu said.
Photo credit: Christine Ma at The Spruce Eats (link above).
