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What even is panko? I mean, it's a kind of breadcrumb, I got that much. It's from Japan,
originally. I know that. The individual crumbs tend to be kinda long and pointy, but sometimes
they're not, and even when you grind it up into tiny little bits, it still fries up way
crispier than any other kind of breadcrumb. Don't be believe me? Try it. Blitz some panko
into a powder and fry with it. Panko-powder schnitzel is on the right, "normal" breadcrumbs
are on the left. The panko schnitzel is way crispier.
That experiment tells us that there's something different about panko on the microscopic level,
and that difference is probably a result of the peculiar way in which the bread for panko
is baked.
"The bread itself is baked through electrical current."
Bzzzzt. That was Gary Kawaguchi, president of Upper Crust Enterprises, a panko manufacturer
in Los Angeles. This is some panko they sent me. Sitting next to Kawaguchi is Vice president
Tom Shea, and this is a video that he put together showing their manufacturing process.
Those metal plates on either side of the dough buckets conduct electricity through the dough,
and the dough's resistance to that current creates heat.
"And the bread is actually steam-cooked from the inside out because of that heat that's
created. And then once the water evaporates enough, the electrical flow stops."
That way of baking has some pretty interesting effects on the resulting bread, the most superficially
obvious being the total lack of a crust.
"When it comes out of the oven it looks like tofu. Because there's no crust, there's no
structure to the bread — and so you really have to not handle it a lot. You have to really
be delicate with it."
And why is that? Well when you bake bread with heat from the outside in — ya know,
like a normal person (RIP pnako I just blew out) — when you bake that way, the outer
surface dries out, it gets really hot and then caramelizes. Those bits of crust are
immediately apparent in breadcrumbs made with normal bread. But the bread for panko has
no crust, and thus has a totally uniform color and more of a neutral flavor. It's a blank
canvass to the cook.
Baking with current also does some things to the interior structure of the loaf, and
that's where things get really interesting, but first, who even came up with the idea
of electrocuting their dough?
Well, there is an origin story for panko that Kawaguchi will relate to us now. I can find
no historical documentation for this, but it's the story he heard from his father who
started the company, and the events described would have taken place in the elder Kawaguchi's
lifetime, so I think this is probably the best guess we've got as to how panko was invented.
It goes back to the Sino-Japanese War, which ultimately became part of World War II.
"Well basically during the war, Japanese soldiers were in China, and they didn't really have
any food, so they had some flour, and basically they mixed the flour and so-forth and connected
it to the battery from a tank."
Necessity is the mother of invention, after all. And historians do trace the current Japanese
love of wheat bread products back to the war, when there were rice shortages. Before then,
bread wasn't very popular. The wheat grown in ancient Japan had unusually small grains.
It just didn't yield that much.
It wasn't until the 16th century when Portuguese traders introduced bread and cakes to Japan
— cakes like this Castella. Wubba wubba. The Portuguese also probably introduced the
word "pan," or "pan" is the authentic pronunciation. "Pan" just means bread in Japanese. "Ko" means
flour or powder or child — it's a bunch of small things made from bread. It literally
means breadcrumb.
"Pan" is the modern Spanish word for bread, too — from the Latin "panis." The Portuguese
say "pão." But in the Old Portuguese dialect those 16th century traders would have been
speaking it was apparently "pan," at least according to wiktionary.
It's also possible the word "pan" was introduced by Spanish traders visiting from their colony
in the Philippines. But regardless, this is all why the guys over at Upper Crust favor
the pronunciation "panko." Anyway, so they shocked their dough with tank batteries.
"When they invented the panko, they ground it and realized it was a different type of
crumb, and then it became popular in Japan after WWII."
No doubt this new industry was helped along by the U.S. flooding Japan with wheat, first
in the form of food aid, and then in the form of some sweetheart trade deals. The spoils
of victory, I guess.
And even though normal ovens were by then in ample supply, panko manufacturers kept
cooking their bread with current, because when you cook your bread from the inside you
get this extremely light, airy crumb that is super crispy when dry.
I hand't really thought about the destination until now, but crunchy just means brittle,
right? Something that is hard and easily shattered.
Crispy means both brittle and airy, light. It's thin sheets of brittle material interspersed
with little voids. That's what airy means.
Compare that panko to some Western-style breadcrumbs. It's just normal bread, staled and/or dried
and/or toasted and then ground up and probably dried some more. On a microscopic level, those
crumbs just aren't as airy.
This is at least part of why panko is so much crispier. Incidentally, that micro-structure
also makes panko more absorbent, which we can see in a simple experiment. 20 grams of
panko in a cup, 20 grams of Western breadcrumbs in a cup. I poured 80 grams of water into
each, and look. The panko is on the left. The other ones absorbed more once agitated
— you can see it turn into a porridge, but the viscosity is still a lot less than the
panko mixture.
The guys at Upper Crust say a lot of the chefs they sell to use panko as a binder in mixtures
like meatballs, and I can see why. If I had used panko instead of Western breadcrumbs
in these salmon burgers that I made, I would have been able bind this mixture and make
it moldable while adding a lot less bread to this beautiful fish. I don't want eat bread
on bread.
Now, you might think that absorbency would be bad for frying, and indeed, panko absorbs
a lot of oil when it fries. But that actually helps transmit the heat to the food, which
cooks it and evaporates water in crust. Water is another enemy of crispiness. Of course,
then you've got a lot of oil in the crumb, and that's bad too, right?
"But when you pull it out of the frier, it drains out. So it's not as greasy, therefore
not as heavy, not as soggy. It stays crispier a lot longer."
Maybe it's those wide-open hollows in the panko that allow the oil to drain. It also
may be be the dryness of it. In this 2014 journal article out of Ohio, researchers describe
the cooling-phase effect. You pull the food out of the frier, and any water or water vapor
left in the crust cools and condenses, creating a vacuum that literally sucks in oil before
it can drain away. People have historically assumed that food gets greasy in the frier,
but these scientists argue a lot of that happens on the cooling rig.
Airiness is how panko is able to be simultaneously more absorbent and crispier. And I think it's
also why you're able to grind this down into a powder and it still retains a lot of those
properties.
If you're with a restaurant or some other kind of commercial food business, Upper Crust
would be happy to sell you some panko ground as fine as you want it, but the traditional
panko shape is like this — big, long shards.
That crumb shape is key to Japanese-style breaded shrimp, or to chicken katsu — basically
a Japanese chicken schnitzel. So how do they get these long, jagged crumbs?
"Some panko is kinda round in shape, some panko is sliver shaped, and really you're
looking for that sliver shape. And that has nothing to do with the grinder. It has everything
to do with how well you did on the baking side, and how well you did on the fermentation
side to allow the proteins to work together to really connect. You get a natural lengthening
of the gluten fibers. When you grind it, it will naturally flake and give you much more
of a sliver kind of a look to the product."
The guys at Upper Crust there make a pretty old-school product. Kawaguchi's father first
started making panko in the U.S. because he had a fish fry business here and he had to
import real panko from Japan. Once he started making his own, a lot of Japanese chefs and
other commercial food businesses came knocking. To this day, Upper Crust only sells to other
businesses — you can't buy their product in stores.
In one of the more endearing moments from my career as an interviewer, Tom Shea there
came prepared with a visual aide he made on cardboard, showing all the retail brands of
Panko in the U.S. that he would recommend if you want that long, sliver shape.
That shape is more expensive to make, because it requires more delicate machining, and more
delicate packaging and packing. Even cheap panko is gonna be a little more expensive
than other breadcrumbs. So, is it worth it?
Well, here's my attempt at a chicken katsu. Some people use breast meat — I really prefer
it made with thighs. I'll just pound those out thin and season aggressively with salt
and pepper. Whenever I'm gonna bread or marinate something, I prefer to just season the meat.
It provides a visual guide for how much to put on, and I just put on a little extra to
account for the marinade or the breading to come. In this case I'm doing both. I'll marinate
them in a little mirin — it's basically Japanese white wine, right? I always say marinate
in a shallow vessel, that way everything can stack up on itself. Then you only have to
use tiny amount of marinade to get everything submerged. It's less wasteful, and it dilutes
the seasoning less.
After at least an hour in there, I'll take those out, dry them off a little, dredge in
flour, beaten egg and that beautiful panko from LA. Neutral oil for shallow frying, and
I think thigh meat tastes better when it cooks a little longer than breast, so I'm gonna
be gentle with my heat. I don't want the crust burn while I'm waiting for my chicken to finish.
Low oil temperature is usually bad for breadcrumbs though — it allows more oil to absorb. And
if you know me, you know that frying is not really my forte.
I'll pull those out to drain, and when I make food videos I shoot solo, which slows me down.
I have to move cameras and lights, and often pause for the parenting of small children.
As a result, my food often has to sit around for a while before I can cut it and shoot
it, and that's bad for fried foods. They absorb moisture from the interior as they sit around.
Traditionally that would have a Japanese brown sauce called Tonkatsu. I don't have any, but
people say you can kinda simulate it by mixing some ketchup and soy sauce and Worcestershire,
and sugar or honey, maybe a little ginger. That's pretty good.
All of this is to say, this is hardly the best chicken katsu anyone has ever made, and
yet it is still crispy. Because panko is foolproof. Crispy every time. I'm running out of reasons
to use any other kinda of breadcrumb for anything.
What if you can't get real panko? Can you make it yourself? Well some people do take
like processed sandwich loafs — a white one. This is wheat, but imagine that it's
white. They cut the crusts off, and then they shred it and dry it, or maybe dry it and shred
it. People have procedures for this online that you can find.
I also found this old U.S. Department of Agriculture text where they claim that some panko producers
microwave their loafs, instead of shocking them. The guys at Upper Crust had never heard
of that, but in theory it would work, right? I would cook the bread from the inside out.
If you try it, let us know how it works. But I bet it'd be pretty tough to make professional-quality
panko yourself.
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Now go bread and fry something. For more specific tips than that, maybe go check out that Ethan
guy's channel instead of mine.