So I had zero clue what shio pan was until the beginning of 2024 when I saw someone make shio pan and referring to them as “salt bread”. This whole time, I just thought that they were chubby croissants, and as someone who has studied Japanese for 5 years and lived in and visited the country on multiple occasions, I was embarrassed to say the least. I literally have seen shio pan featured in the bakery of “Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap” over 20 years ago, and I assumed that it was a croissant. For those, who like me in 2023 and earlier, who do not know what shio pan is, it is a fluffy rolled up piece of bread that kind of looks like a croissant. The yeasted dough is rolled around a piece of salted butter, and finished with a light sprinkling of salt on top. During the baking process, the butter will melt and cause the inside to slightly souffle, kind of like a croissant, but with a lot less layers and a lot more fluffy, light bread. I could even say that my failed croissant attempts are basically shio pan, because they kind of are. “Shio” means salt in Japanese, and “pan” means bread, by the way, just wanted to include a fun vocabulary lesson here. So to make up for the fact I have no clue what shio pan was, despite literally having seen it in many Japanese bakeries over my over two decades of being alive on this earth, I figured, let’s make up for some lost time here, and make three kinds!

The dough itself is going to be the same across all three variations of shio pan, being a milk bread dough. To make milk bread, you need to start with a tangzhong, or cooked roux mixture. Stirring milk and some of your flour in a pot over medium-ish heat allows for the starches in the flour to cook out and thicken the milk – this creates gelled starches that when added to a dough, keeps the dough from drying out. The key with any yeasted dough, especially milk bread, is temperature control. You need to let the tangzhong cool down, otherwise if it is too hot, it will kill off your yeast in the bread dough, and that in turn will cause your bread to become a dense cracker instead of a light, fluffy loaf. To help with that, one thing I like to do with my tangzhong is after it is thickened enough to smear, I take it off heat and add eggs and straight from the refrigerator butter to it – this helps not only with incorporating butter into my dough, but the cold butter brings down the temperature of the tangzhong rapidly. If you do not have a thermometer to temperature check your tangzhong, I usually just hover my hand over it – if it feels uncomfortably hot to you, then it will be too hot for your yeast. You generally don’t want your dough to be exposed to temperatures warmer than a hot shower. With my fillings, on top of the salted butter, we are stuffing these shio pan with either black sesame paste, Biscott, or Nutella, and garnishing them with either black sesame seeds, crushed Biscoff cookies, or chocolate and chopped hazelnuts to finish! This dough is super customizable, so I say do whatever fillings, sweet or savory, you want with it!

Makes 15 portions:
For the milk bread dough:
2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour, in 5 parts
1 cup milk
2 tbsp unsalted butter
1 canola oil
1 egg
a pinch of salt
1 packet active-dry yeast
1 tbsp granulated sugar

In a pot, mix together two parts of the flour with 1 cup of milk and stir the two together on medium heat until a thick paste forms. Take the paste off heat and stir into that the butter, canola oil egg, and salt to bring down the temperature of the paste. Once the paste is cooled down enough to dough, add to that the remaining ingredients, kneading them together to form an elastic dough. Place the dough into a lightly oiled bowl and cover with cling wrap. Let the dough rest at room temperature for 1 hour before transferring to the refrigerator.

For the fillings:
Black sesame paste
Biscoff spread
Nutella

For garnish:
Black sesame seeds
Crumbled Biscoff cookies
Crushed hazelnuts and dark chocolate

For assembly:
1 egg yolk
7.5 tbsp salted butter, portioned into .5 tbsp-rectangles(can substitute with unsalted but use a pinch of salt per tbsp)

Divide the dough into 15 pieces. Roll each piece out to be a vaguely triangular shape. Spread onto each piece either the black sesame paste, Biscoff spread, or Nutella. On the wide side, place on a tbsp of butter. Roll the dough up, in the same fashion of a croissant. Let the breads sit at room temperature, 3 inches apart on lined sheet trays, for 2 hours. Then brush the tops with a beaten egg yolk and sprinkle the garnishes on top. Bake the shio pan at 375 degrees F for 22 minutes.