Baking Flat Melon Bread Inspired by Tomizawa Shoten
There's a baking supply shop I always make sure to visit when I travel to Japan: Tomizawa Shoten.
You can usually find it easily in the basement of department stores. They offer a wide variety of baking ingredients and tools at relatively reasonable prices.
I usually screenshot the things I want to buy from their website beforehand. The site also introduces various recipes, making it hard to leave once you're on it.
On my recent visit to the Tomizawa Shoten website, I discovered a recipe for 'Hirayaki Melon Bread (平焼きメロンパン).' The baking process looked fun, so I decided to try making it right away.
Hirayaki means 'flat-baked' in Japanese. As the name suggests, it's a flat melon bread.
I doubled the recipe and used my KitchenAid mixer for the mixing process. The dough has a beautiful color because it contains 40% eggs.
I did the first proofing in a Smeg oven at 35 degrees Celsius. The dough rose so high that I covered the container with the same container, dome-like, for proofing.
I divided the dough into 12 pieces and gave it a bench time of 20 minutes. I also divided the cookie dough into 12 pieces and prepared them.
The cookie dough was rounded, then rolled out into a circle. I placed plastic wrap between them to prevent them from sticking and put them in the freezer for 5-10 minutes.
Bench time before and after.
Since I didn't have the specified 'Zarame' sugar in the recipe, I mixed Hagel sugar and unrefined sugar for 6 of them, and used only unrefined sugar for the other 6.
The second proofing was done in the oven for only 30 minutes, and some were done at room temperature. Looking back, it seems like the proofing volume was insufficient.
I covered it with parchment paper and a pan before putting it in the oven.
After preheating to 200 degrees Celsius, I baked it in convection mode at 180 degrees Celsius for 15 minutes. Because I used a regular stainless steel pan, the pan warped in the middle, so I pressed it down once to ensure it baked flat. Next time, it might be better to alternate the stainless steel pan and the coated pan, placing them on top and bottom.
I baked it in the oven covered with parchment paper and a pan, and then removed the cover at the end to add more color.
The finished flat melon bread looked like mini honey pancakes that I used to bake in a frying pan when I was young.
The ones with the crunchy Hagel sugar had a better texture. It would have been much tastier with coarse Zarame sugar. The cookie dough was crispy and sweet, but the crumb was a bit dry, likely due to insufficient second proofing and pressing it too flat, which was a bit disappointing.
Dipping it in milk or sandwiching it with some moist strawberry jam in the middle would make it even more delicious!
The Tomizawa Shoten website is full of interesting recipes besides the one I tried this time.
If you're looking for fun baking recipes, I recommend visiting their website.
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