Easy recipe turns even sliced bread and curry pan into this famous sweet snack.
Melon pan are sweet round buns with crunchy scored exteriors, fluffy soft interiors and a faint taste of Japanese muskmelon, and they have a cult following amongst people in Japan and tourists who visit from overseas.
If you’ve ever visited Japan and tasted a melon pan (“pan” is the word for “bread” in Japanese), chances are you’ll be craving it when you return home. Now we’ve found a super easy way you can get a taste of it wherever you are in the world, with a recipe you can make in your own kitchen, using any type of bread you can find at your local store.
All you need, in addition to bread, is the following five ingredients:
- Butter — 50 grams (1.8 ounces)
- Caster sugar — 50 grams
- Granulated sugar — for dusting
- Cake flour – 100 grams
- One egg (yolk only)
Melon pan is essentially bread wrapped in a cookie-like casing, so what we’re making with these five ingredients is cookie dough. You can find easy recipes for this online, but for our purposes, we’ll be mixing the caster sugar and egg yolk into room-temperature butter…
▼ …and then adding sifted flour to the mix.
▼ Once it’s all mixed well together, leave it to sit in the refrigerator for around 30 minutes.
After the dough has cooled, it’s time to get out your breads. We purchased a few unusual varieties to see how they would taste as melon pan, so feel free to stick to plain bread or get as weird and wacky as you want.
▼ We chose a bun filled with sweet red bean paste, a curry pan, and some good ‘ol sliced white bread.
▼ Now it’s time to get wrapping!
Starting with the red bean paste bun, we simply placed it on a thin layer of the cookie dough and gently wrapped the dough around the bun, being careful to not break it. Then we scored it diagonally both ways and sprinkled it with granulated sugar…
▼ …and the result looked so much like melon pan that even we were impressed!
It looked exactly like a melon bread you’d buy at a store, although you’d never guess that a sweet red bean bun was hiding inside. Following the same process, we achieved a similar look with the curry bread, and although there was no hiding the sliced bread, it looked pretty good too.
As the breads are already baked, the baking time doesn’t have to be long — simply in line with the oven time for cookies.
▼ So, after 15 minutes in a preheated oven at 170 degrees Celsius (338 degrees Fahrenheit)…
▼ …the melon breads were ready to eat!
The result wasn’t bad for a first attempt, and now the only thing to do was enlist some taste testers to give us their verdict on the melon breads. We lined them up beside the pre-transformed breads, which we’d simply toasted, for a taste comparison.
Sitting in as our judges, we have Seiji Nakazawa, Mr Sato and P.K. Sanjun, all of whom are sweet connoisseurs. So what did they have to say?
▼ “I don’t want to admit it, but…it’s good.”
▼ “Yeah, it’s done well.”
▼ “This is…it’s unexpectedly good.”
When these adjudicators began the taste test, they said they would only have a mouthful of each bread, but after tasting them, they kept on eating them.
▼ A testament to how good these breads were.
When asked to choose their favourites, P.K. praised the red bean bun, saying:
“The exterior was nice and crispy and the bread seemed like a normal melon pan bread, but the red bean paste was a delicious surprise!”
Seiji liked the curry bread, saying:
“It’s surprising that curry bread and sweet cookie dough go so well together. The curry bread’s outer layer is thick so it delays the curry flavor, but if the curry were directly under the cookie dough that would’ve been amazing.”
Mr Sato said:
“Everything was good. It’s a shame the cookie dough couldn’t have been a little thinner, though.”
▼ In the end, there was one winner, with the red bean bun melon pan getting two votes, and the others one each.
▼ The red bean bun melon pan is so good that specialty stores should add it to their menus.
So kudos to our reporter Ikuna Kamezawa, who was in charge of making the breads, which made her the most popular person in the office for the day.
Not only did she introduce our reporters to new ways to enjoy melon pan, she surprised herself with how simple they were to make, and how good they tasted.
With this being her first attempt, she reckons that with a bit of practice she could get even closer to the look of a melon pan in future. The results were so good that she’s now keen to experiment with more bread varieties like convenience store hot dog buns and the world-famous peanut cream sandwich…if you have other ideas for her to try, be sure to let us know!
Photos ©SoraNews24
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