What is panko, and why is it so much better than other breadcrumbs?

this video is sponsored by squarespace 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 kind of 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 kind of bread crumb don't believe me try it blitz some panko into a powder and fry with it panko powdered 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 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 of that heat that's created and then once the water evaporates enough the electric 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 it comes out of the oven it looks like tofu and 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 you know like a normal person r.i.p panko 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 canvas to the cook baking with currant 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 was in china and didn't really have anything any food so it has flour and basically they mix the flour and so forth and basically connected to the battery from attack 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 the portuguese also probably introduced the word pan or pon is the authentic pronunciation pon just means bread in japanese ko means flower or powder or a child it's a bunch of small things made from bread it literally means bread crumbs pon is the modern spanish word for bread too from the latin panus the portuguese say pow but in the old portuguese dialect those 16th century traders would have been speaking it was apparently pon or at least that's 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 uppercrest favor the pronunciation ponco anyway so they shocked their dough with tank batteries when they invented the ponco they ground it and realized it was a different type of crumb and then it became popular in japan after world war ii 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 hadn't really thought about the distinction 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 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 microstructure 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 one's 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 to bind this mixture and make it moldable while adding a lot less bread to this beautiful fish i don't want to 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 the 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 when you pull it out of the fryer it drains out and so it's not as greasy therefore not as heavy not as soggy 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 the dryness of it in this 2015 journal article out of ohio researchers describe the cooling phase effect you pull the food out of the fryer 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 fryer 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 i think it's also why you're able to grind this down to 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 kind of round in shape and some ponco is sliver shape and you really are 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 kind of really connect and so you get a natural lengthening of the of the gluten fibers so when you grind it it will naturally flake and give you much more of a sliver kind of a look to the to the product the guys at upper crust there make a pretty old school product kawaguchi's father first started making panko in the us 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 aid 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 going to be a little more expensive than other bread crumbs so is it worth it well here's my attempt at chicken katsu some people use breast meat i really prefer it made with thighs and i'll just pound those out thin and season aggressively with salt and pepper whenever i'm going to 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 miren that'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 a 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 the 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 breasts so i'm going to be gentle with my heat i don't want the crust to burn while i'm waiting for my chicken to finish low oil temperature is usually bad for bread crumbs 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 kind of simulate it by mixing some ketchup when soy sauce and worcestershire and sugar and honey maybe a little ginger that's pretty good all this 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 kind 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 us 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 it would cook the bread from the inside out if you try it let us know how it works but i bet it would be pretty tough to make professional quality panko yourself in contrast it's totally easy to make a professional quality website yourself if you use squarespace you just go to squarespace.com and pick a template there's ones here that are simple enough for just a personal portfolio or cv site but if you need to do something more complicated they've got you covered so you need to sell a subscription to your breadcrumb of the month club or sell gift cards for said club squarespace can do that say you need to optimize your search engine rating for when people are googling breadcrumbs squarespace can help so you need to embed a map to your brick and mortar breadcrumb emporium squarespace has you covered all the back-end stuff too the credit card transactions everything squarespace is an all-in-one solution you can save 10 on your first site or your first domain registration by going to squarespace.com regucia thank you squarespace now go bread and fry something for more specific tips than that maybe go check out that ethan guys channel instead of mine

Channel: Adam Ragusea

Views: 1,541,910

Rating: 4.9447289 out of 5

Keywords: panko bread crumbs, bread crumbs, panko recipes, what is panko, how to make panko, what is panko crumbs, panko bread crumbs recipe, homemade panko, how to make panko bread crumbs, what is panko made of, what is panko breading, what is panko made out of, homemade panko breadcrumbs, panko bread crumbs chicken, chicken katsu

Id: n-hKc2QhJzc

Length: 11min 27sec (687 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 14 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/thepseudonym12344]

Literally mealtime videos

[u/dance_rattle_shake]

I knew this was a Ragusea video just from the title

[u/Xciv]

Watching this while eating some delicious Pork Katsu.

So crispy, so good! Love vids that explain how food is made.

[u/professorjaytee]

Start with fluffy white or good french bread.

1. Cut off all the crust, and slice if not sliced.
2. Dry it by cooking several slices 10-20 seconds at a time in a microwave, then setting them on a rack to cool and dry a couple minutes. It may take several runs to turn the slices of bread into stiff white bricks.
3. Over a LARGE bowl, rub the cooled, brick-like slices together and "flake" them completely apart into crumbs. Pick up any larger crumbs and repeat until small enough for you.

Taa-daa! Panko-made-at-home.This is what my Japanese wife's mother did when she ran out of prepared while cooking a meal, BTW. I got detailed to do the crumbling part.

Note: the "electric" bullshit is just that. Panko is several hundred years old, predating electricity in Japan.

[u/Warbek_2]

Wow, that was incredibly well researched for a video about breadcrumbs!

[u/thefloridafive]

It's a Japanese breadcrumb

[u/Pirotez]

Would microwaving bread have the same effect as electrifying?

[u/realfakehamsterbait]

I'm surprised how much criticism there is of Adam in this thread. As far as I know he's never represented himself as some kind of cooking expert. He's an experienced home cook with a background in journalism, which makes him a good communicator. I'm pretty sure he specifically targets people who don't cook or don't cook very much.

My wife doesn't think he's all that interesting because she's been cooking for years. I rarely cook, and he's literally the only cooking show that's actually gotten me to cook anything. I love Tasting History to death but I'll probably never make anything Max does on his show.

[u/IcanSew831]

Fascinating. I’ll be using panko from now on. Electrified bread. Who’d have thunk it?