Japanese Shokupan and Mexican Conchas

By Meryle Evans

Competition for Croissants?

From Dominique Ansel’s soft, fluffy, Japanese milk bread to Mariela Camacho’s re-imagined Mexican conchas, innovative bakers and pastry chefs across the country are expanding their repertoires, offering an array of cross- cultural creations that blend global flavors with regional influences. While croissant mania persists, and sourdough loaves are still flying off bakery shelves, many classically-trained professionals are pushing back against rigid expectations of authenticity and incorporating their lived experience into their work as Bon Appetit reported in a 2024 article, Bakers Unbound. A bevy of newspapers, food magazines, and trend forecasters have been weighing in on the shift, focusing on the contributions of artisans with Asian or Latinx connections who are re-discovering Japanese shokupan and re-vitalizing pan dulce.

White bread…is cool again” was the theme of a feature article in The New York Times Style section last November, illustrated by a Japanese artist wearing headgear composed of rolls and a loaf of bread. The writer, Ella Quittner, identified the genre as a family of cousins: brioche, shokupan, Parker House Rolls, and Pullman loaf – made with commercial leavener and refined flour – for a mellow flavor and soft texture. Quittner cited examples such as Ansel’s Mother’s Day shokupan special, the golden dinner rolls at the restaurant Ernest in San Francisco, and the warm loaves at Penny, a popular new Manhattan seafood restaurant. At Penny, the brioche-like loaf is served with butter and anchovies during the meal, and reappears for dessert in a thick vanilla ice cream sandwich with strawberry compote.

“At the Dominique Ansel Workshop,” Ansel explains, “we create a special pastry every weekend – it’s a way for us to explore something new, it might be a regional dessert, or inspired by pastries from other cultures…” And he adds: “For Mother’s Day, we created a light and fluffy loaf in the style of shokupan, but we used Le Grands Moulins de Paris flour from France and laminated the dough with Beurre d’Isigny butter (in a similar way to laminating croissant dough). The result was this beautifully flaky and airy bread. When it came out of the oven, we sprinkled a dry caramel over the top and baked it for just a few more minutes, so you get this almost bruleed and super thin caramelized crust on the outside. It was paired with a jar of our homemade strawberry jam.”

Ansel followed up this winter with Hokkaido Milk Cloud Bread for the Lunar New Year weekend. His version of the light and airy sponge cake is made with pastry flour for a lower gluten content, whipped egg whites folded in for fluffiness, and Hokkaido milk from Japan, which, he says, “has a beautifully rich and creamy flavor.” Expanding the concept, the pastry provocateur is opening a new shop in Manhattan this spring inspired by Asian bread culture. Called Papa d’Amour, it’s the nickname the chef’s kids call him, and a tribute to the family’s Taiwanese and French cultural heritage.

Meanwhile, on the west coast, Redondo Beach, Ca. is welcoming Bread, Espresso & — yes, that’s the full name — the first American outpost of a prestigious Japanese bakery/ café chain, noted for its traditional techniques and contemporary flavors. Executive chef Sakurai Tadatsugu, who came from Japan to oversee the opening, explains that the brand’s signature “mou” bread, (a French word meaning soft), is a hybrid of milk bread and brioche a cube shaped loaf with a buttery flavor, soft, pillowy inside, with a crisp crust. There are multiple variations available, from matcha to chocolate, savory sandwich options and French toast served in a miniature skillet.

Breads, Espresso & joins myriad Asian/ fusion bakeries, many along the west coast. with eclectic menus that embrace crossover cuisine. Yasuaki Saito’s Saint Bread in Seattle, named one of The New York Times’ 22 Best Bakeries Across the United States Right Now, offers a mix of Asian and European specialties: cardamom croissant, yuzu polenta cake and a maple melonpan, the fluffy Japanese bun topped with a crackly maple sugar cookie.

In Oakland, Ca. milk buns are mainstays at Bake Sum, founded by Joyce Tang and two other classically trained chefs in 2020. The selection changes monthly with flavors such as black sesame, red bean, honey dew, strawberry and peach on the menu along with a Gochujang pull-apart, and an okonomiyaki Danish, inspired by the savory Japanese pancake. For vegan aficionados, Kym Estrada and Arvin Torres, partners at San & Wolves Bakeshop in Long Beach, Ca, have just transitioned from pop up to storefront, serving plant-based Filipino classics with a twist such as the brioche style ube cheese ensayada filled with ube halaya and topped with aqua faba-based butter cream and cheddar style “cheez.”

Acclaimed pastry chef Clarice Lam, whose parents emigrated from Hong Kong, grew up in California, and highlights her love of Asian flavors in her new cookbook, Breaking Bao (Chronicle Books 2024), named a best cookbook of 2024 by both Food & Wine and The New York Times. Breaking Bao, Lam explains, “is a culinary journey bridging gaps between Asian flavors and global techniques.” The first recipe in the book is for shokupan, the base for many of Lam’s breads and buns, including garlic butter scallion buns, gochujang pizza rolls and strawberry mascarpone maritozzi. Lam has also pointed out the similarities between her childhood favorite bolo bao, the sweet b with a crispy cookie layer in the shape of a pineapple, Japanese cantaloupe shaped melonpan, a the conchas she discovered in the Mexican bakeries she went to a a kid. “I found it trippy,” Lam says about melonpan, “that two such distant cultures created baked goods with so much in common.”

It is conchas that are current attracting the most attention in the press, with recent articles in Eater, Food & Wine, and Bon Appetit describing the new crop of bakers with Latinx roots reva traditional shell-shaped Mexican pan dulce, and The New York Times predicting in January that “conchas will keep riding a wave.”

Riding that wave is Mariela Camacho, a first-generation American and experienced baker who began reviving and reclaiming conchas with a pop-up in 2017. Now Camacho is a two-time James Beard award nominee, and her celebrated Comadre Panaderia, ensconced in a brick and mortar building in Austin, Texas, since 2023, has been named one of the Times’ 22 Best Bakeries in America.

Visiting family in Mexico as a child, Camacho discovered conchas that were fresher, had more flavor, and were more subtly spiced than their American counterparts. After a decade of restaurant work, she channeled the nostalgia for her native culture into a thriving business. Explaining the evolution of her conchas in a King Arthur Baking Blog, Camacho wrote: “Bit by bit I adjusted my recipe. I subbed in whole grain and stone- ground flours for nutrition and flavor and used traditional unrefined sugars like panela and piloncillo instead of white sugar. I also used the highest quality (locally produced when possible) butter and eggs I could get my hands on. The result was a concha that was less sweet and more flavorful.” As the bakery has flourished, Camacho has introduced a variety of Latin/Texan-accented pastries such as the much-admired pig shaped cookie flavored with warm spices, piloncillo and malted barley, and a beverage program showcasing Mexican coffee, cacao, and cold drinks.

However, the concha recipe remains the same. “The flavor comes from the shell pretty much,” she explains, “we don’t use any artificial dyes or extracts; for the red berry we use freeze-dried strawberry or raspberry, or a beautiful vanilla, and chocolate that comes from a friend, and then if we see something cool, we just kind of go for it, and now we are doing cardamom. It’s really important that we are in touch with our sources. Our aim is to nourish our community’s body and soul through our bread.”

Nourishing the community is also the vision of Arturo Enciso’s Gusto Bread in Long Beach, Ca., with a back story similar to Comadre. Both started as cottage industries in 2017, transitioned to a storefront, were Beard award nominees in 2024 and landed on the Times 22 Best Bakeries list. They also shared accolades in the Bon Appetit 2024 article, Bakers Unbound in which Elazar Sontag described the Gusto Bread signature pastry the Doha: “a twice-baked concha layered with almond cream, seasonal jam — peach one week; prickly pear the next — and finished with a dramatic storm of slivered almonds and powdered sugar,” an example of how Enciso and his partner. Ana Belen Salatino, “pay respect to tradition while blending Mexican and European approaches to baking.”

While bakeries such as Comadre and Gusto are garnering accolades, concha- themed pop ups and cottage enterprises are also thriving as Latinx bakers experiment with new formulas and flavors. In Atlanta, Ga, second-generation Mexican-American Teresa Finney helps fund her home-based micro- bakery, At Heart Panaderia, with freelance recipe development and writing. She stresses the importance of using local ingredients such as flour from a Georgia farm and produce from her CSA in her signature raspberry pistachio concha, and has also adjusted the recipe to reduce the sugar. She also swapped water for milk.

In an article about revamping the concha, Jaya Saxena, a correspondent at Eater.com, notes the pop-up success of Mayra Sibrian in Seattle and Ximena Suarez in San Francisco. Sibrian, a culinary-school graduate and food- show contestant, left restaurant work during Covid to start Pan de la Selva, blending “the traditions of her childhood with the flavors of her Pacific Northwest community.” Among the conchas she sells at farmer’s markets and cafes: blood orange with honey almond frangipane, lemon and pepita-sage frangipane, and cranberry coconut.

Suarez, Saxena explains, quit her marketing job in 2022 to start Florecita Panaderia and has introduced a variety of non-traditional conchas such as blue corn, churro, matcha and mango. Florecita was also featured in an article in Food & Wine last fall about Mexican bakeries innovating pan dulce in the Bay area. The writer, Becky Duffett. took note of the flower stamped on top instead of the usual shell, the real butter flavor and lack of eggs — her partner and husband Jared Williams is allergic — explaining “she swaps in apple cider vinegar to help the dough rise which definitely yields a tighter crumb, but it’s tooth-sinkingly soft and tender.”

The annual AF & Co + Carbonate 2025 Hospitality Trends Report highlighted both conchas and Japanese-style bread. In a paragraph titled “All in Good Conchas” Carbonate reported that pedigreed bakers are taking pan dulce “from an inexpensive sweet snack to star status.”

Posing the question “What’s the Next Croissant?” The forecasters predicted it would be tissue or 1,000-layer bread, “soft, fluffy, milk bread baked into ultra-thin layers with a crispy exterior.” This variation on shokupan is already popular in Japan and Korea, and, according to Carbonate, given “the speed in which trends now travel – be on the lookout for this layered delight across the U.S.”

Until the next novelty arrives, savor the shokupan and crave the conchas.

(This article appeared in the Spring 2025 issue of Pastry Arts Magazine)