Melon Pan メロンパン
Melon Pan is a Japanese sweet bread that consists of a crunchy, crispy cookie top on the outside and soft, fluffy bread on the inside. It is extremely delicious and I will show you how to make this elegant Japanese sweet treat at home. Check out my recipe below.
Jump to RecipeLet me tell you one little fun fact about the melon pan. Despite its name, you actually cannot find melon or taste any melon flavour within the traditional melon pan. However, some of the stores have included melon flavoured crust or melon curd inside to make it lives up to its name nowadays.
You might wonder why do we call this popular Japanese sweet bread “melon pan” then? There is no conclusive answer yet the most convincing theory, in my opinion, is that because of its appearance which resembles an oriental melon.
Living abroad in the UK, it is quite hard to look for a decent melon pan sold outside at the store. I would recommend you to check out the Japan centre for this lovely sweetbread if you could not bother to replicate this at home. Also, the melon Pan looks very similar to Polo Bun, which confused me when I was young but they are totally different pastry!
Melon Pan
Ingredients
Bread
- 30 g Unsalted butter
- 2 tsp Salt
- 80 ml Semi-skimmed milk
- 1 Egg
- 50 ml Water
- 2 tsp Dried active yeast
- 200 g All-purpose flour/ bread flour
- 15 g Sugar
Filling
- 30 g Dark chocolate
- 30 g Salted butter
Cookie
- 1 Lemon
- 1 tsp Lemon juice
- 1 Egg
- 1 cup Cake flour
- 35 g Sugar
- 70 g Unsalted butter
- 10 g Cocoa powder
Instructions
Bread
- Add 200g all-purpose flour, 1 tsp dried active yeast, 1 egg, 2 tsp salt, 15 g sugar, 50ml water and 80ml semi-skimmed milk into a mixing bowl and mix thoroughly using hand until a dough begins to form.
- Transfer the dough onto a lightly floured surface and begins the hand-kneading process for 10 minutes until the dough gets more elastic and less sticky.
- Then, add 20g unsalted butter to the dough and continues kneading for 10 minutes until the dough is smooth and silky. (Hand kneading refers to – fold the dough, pull it apart, put it back together, bang it against the surface and repeat the whole process again.
- Place your dough back into a mixing bowl and set aside for proofing purposes for 1 hour for it to rise.
- After 1 hour, transfer the dough onto your work surface and punch it down to remove gas bubbles formed by the yeast.
- Then, divide the dough into 12 portions and smoothen each one into a round shape.
- Let it rise for another 15 minutes.
- Press the dough to release an additional gas bubble, wrap 5g of salted butter in the dough and repeat for 6 dough balls.
- Repeat the same process for the remaining 6 doughs, but wrap it up with 5g of dark chocolate.
Cookie
- Add 35g sugar, 70g unsalted butter, 1 egg into a mixing bowl and stir thoroughly.
- Add grated lemon zest (from 1 lemon) and 1tsp of lemon juice. (Adjust the sourness according to your preference!)
- Sift 1 cup cake flour and 30g ground almond on top of the batter (from Step 11) and whisk it until the mixture becomes sticky.
- Divide the batter into 2 portions: (i) On the first portion: make 6 round doughs out from this portion.(ii) On the second portion: add 10g cocoa powder and repeat (i) to get 6 cocoa dough balls.
- Flatten each "dough ball" under a cling firm and cool them in the fridge for 30 minutes.
Bake it up
- Wrap the flattened cookie dough from Step 15 on top of the bread dough from Step 10.
- Dip the surface of the wrapped dough into sugar.
- Carve the surface using a dough scraper to make the "tic-tac-toe" sign.
- Let it rise for an hour such that they double the size.
- Bake the buns in an oven preheated to 180 °C for 15 minutes.