![]() In the 1960s, the new postwar frozen food industry hungered for high-quality breadcrumbs. Influential women’s magazine Shufu no tomo and the inaugural issue of boys’ DIY magazine Shōnen kōsaku both featured instructions for bread makers derived from Akutsu’s design in 1946, reflecting the popularity of electric power in light of consumer fuel shortages and, conversely, excess generating capacity with military factories shut down (Uchida and Aoki 2019, 484). Courtesy of JACAR.Īfter the war, companies such as Sony began selling rice cookers and bread machines that adapted these wartime technologies, and DIY home bread makers were showcased in magazines and newspapers. Figure 1: Type 97 field kitchen interior structure. It is a form of electroconductive heating that passes electric current through foods to heat them rapidly and uniformly, quickly producing a light, yeasty, crust-free bread. The highly efficient cooking process Akutsu used goes by several names, including ohmic and Joule heating. The 97’s cooker was an insulated wooden box with electrode plates attached to the base and four sides of the interior. In 1937, paymaster captain Akutsu Shōzō’s design became the “Type 97” field kitchen, first deployed with the IJA’s First Independent Mixed Brigade that year (Uchida 2020, 2–4). As Katarzyna Cwiertka has noted, the military generally advocated bread, but there was a special urgency in light of the logistical difficulties of supplying rice to new front lines in Siberia and Manchuria. Cost was no object and time was of the essence. Then in 1933, the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) commissioned a “field kitchen that can prepare both rice and bread”(Aoki 2019, 11). Japanese inventors had tinkered with electric cooking prototypes since at least the 1920s. Upper Crust’s president, Gary Kawaguchi, affirmed this account in a recent interview. Why are these Japanese breadcrumbs different? How did they get to be that way? The story told by American manufacturers such as LA-based Upper Crust Enterprises―an ironic name given that the secret to panko is crust-free bread―is that “Japanese soldiers during World War II discovered crustless bread made for better breadcrumbs as they cooked it with electricity from tank batteries, not wanting to draw the enemy’s attention with smoke from a fire”(Nassauer 2013). Panko caught on because it is crunchier (and stays crunchy under restaurant heat lamps), absorbs less oil, and adds more volume than traditional breadcrumbs (Nassauer 2013). Five years later, one in six American households regularly stocked panko in the pantry. In 2007, panko accounted for only 3% of US breadcrumb sales, for instance. That ingredient was panko, which has since become a staple for American home and professional cooks alike. In 1998, the New York Times introduced readers to an exotic new ingredient described as “a light, airy variety worlds away from the acrid, herb-flecked, additive-laden bread crumbs in the supermarket,” with a texture “more like crushed cornflakes or potato chips” than its plebeian brethren (Fabricant 1998).
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