Wow! This was going to be about chicken recipes, and then I got sidetracked onto whether it is possible to make your own Panko bread crumbs. You know me, I make whatever I can from scratch because I don't go to the store very often.

What is special about Panko crumbs is they don't absorb oil like other breadings, so stay crisp and non-mybloggers for frying or as a baked topping. According to the second video below, one distinction is that the crumbs are "slivery shaped" while other bread crumbs are more rounded.

Here is a recipe:
Panko Style Bread Crumbs
preheat oven to ~300
cut off crusts and tear bread into chunks
shred in food processor until you have coarse flakes
bake in oven for 5-8 minutes until dry (not toasted. if browned, you've gone too far. unless you used wheat or bread crust, which are brown. in that case, never mind.)
1 loaf = 3-4 cups

Looking at all the hits I got from my 'make your own panko' search, there are two schools of thought: those who say Japanese housewives made their own crumbs (in Japanese pan means bread, and ko means small pieces) so we can too.

And some say that a special saltier (to provide more electrolyte) dough is stretched over a wire mesh and then cooked via electrical impulses.

Others say it's simply white bread that is grated and then dried in the oven and they posted a link to a coarse plastic grater with a slice of bread in the graphics.


Here is a video about the making of panko bread crumbs, and they show the making of white bread into loaves and then grating the loaves using knives on the outside of a rotary drum, so it's the same as us coarsely grating some bread (as long as the texture of the bread itself is light and crisp, and the shape of the pieces is long and splintery).

The descriptive subtitles are in Japanese, so I don't understand the difference between the bread that came out with a browned crust and the pasty loaves that didn't brown at all; from the second video I decided this is where electricity is used to cook the dough for the pasty bread.

It's a 10 minute video, but as a bread maker, I found the industrial process fascinating, thinking of my parallel steps toward the same end.



This second video has an English narrative, and explains the electric current baking method. They say they rise the dough three times to make a light and airy bread. How the crumbs are made is revealed in the first 4 minutes. The rest includes some recipes.



Between these two videos, you get a pretty good idea of the industrial process.

I have to think about which of my bread recipes yields a very light textured product - three risings doesn't do the trick, there has to be more to it (more like less in terms of ingredients - no eggs, butter etc.) But it has to have enough structure to be grated. I don't feel like baking a special batch of bread right now, so am going to do a quick experiment in the food processor with some Double Fiber sliced bread, just for a general idea.

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Oh! there's that hummingbird with the broken leg at the bird feeder again. I noticed it when I was standing out there earlier. One of her feet is just hanging down with some plant fluff stuck to it. She can't perch on the feeder, so uses her wings to hover while she gets a drink. I watched her fly over to the bushes, and it looks like she manages to perch there, so gets some rest. I wonder how she broke her leg, and don't know how long she can survive like this. Most of them sit on the feeder for several minutes at a time, lapping up the juice and she doesn't spend that much time. Hopefully she is still able to catch bugs.