MY HOLY GRAIL

Growing up in Switzerland, bread wasn’t just food. It was infrastructure.

Bread had a starring role at breakfast, a reliable supporting role at lunch and dinner, and a quiet cameo appearance whenever someone felt a bit peckish. With roughly 200 officially recognised types of bread, there was enough variety to keep life interesting, balanced, and pleasantly crumb-filled.

One thing united all of them: it had to be fresh.

This wasn’t difficult. Bakeries were everywhere, often opening at 6 a.m. Fresh bread for breakfast wasn’t a luxury; it was the default setting. And just in case life ever failed us, my mum kept a carefully curated emergency supply in the freezer.

Defrosted bread, of course, is never quite the same as fresh. But dark Swiss bread ages gracefully. Left to defrost naturally, it retains dignity, flavour, and most importantly, structure. Plastic bags were strictly forbidden. Yes, they might keep bread “fresh” for longer, but at the unacceptable cost of sogginess. Swiss bread requires a proper crust. Without it, it’s just a failed sponge.

The undisputed holy grail, for me, was wood-fired oven bread – known in polite English as country bread, and in Swiss German as Buurebrot. Light and aromatic on the inside. Crusty on the outside. This was bread that meant business.

One of my most vivid childhood memories is spending a two-week skiing holiday in our family’s Alpine apartment, where every morning involved a short walk down the snowy hill to a tiny local bakery. That bakery produced the best loaf of Buurebrot I have ever eaten. I still remember the smell, the crunch, the way it tasted at the rustic breakfast table, overlooking the wintry landscape outside the window. Nostalgia has a flavour, and for me, it is that bread.

Now fast-forward to Japan.

In contrast to Switzerland's 200 distinct types of bread, Japan's number is... undefined.

Attempting to count the types of bread in Japan is like trying to count the stars – if the stars were constantly being reinvented with seasonal fillings, anime character faces, and obscure western ingredients.

Japan operates on a simple but ambitious philosophy: “If it can be baked, we will put something inside it.”

Japanese bread generally falls into three distinct kingdoms:

First, Shokupan – which literally translates into "eating bread", although it escapes me what possible alternative uses there could be for bread, other than eating it... Shokupan is the gold standard. It is impossibly soft, slightly sweet, and often sold in slices so thick they could double as emergency pillows.

Then there’s Kashi Pan, or sweet bread, where logic quietly leaves the room.

Take Melon Pan: a sugar-crusted bun that looks like a melon, feels like a cookie, and contains precisely zero percent melon. It is a triumph of marketing over truth.

Or Anpan, the venerable grandfather of Japanese bread. A soft bun filled with sweet red bean paste, invented in 1874 by a former samurai who, after losing his job, decided to reinvent baking. As career changes go, it was remarkably successful.

And then there is Sozai Pan, savoury bread – the result of a nation deciding that a sandwich is too boring.

Curry Pan is deep-fried bread filled with curry. It is essentially a doughnut that has chosen dinner.

Yakisoba Pan is a hot dog bun filled with fried noodles. That’s carbohydrates placed inside other carbohydrates – a nutritional act of violence that is, inexplicably, beloved.

From a Swiss perspective, all these Japanese “bread” varieties share one uncomfortable truth: they are simply… not bread.

Living in a city like Tokyo helps. There are excellent French bakeries nearby, producing very good European-style loaves. They come close. Very close. But still – something is missing.

Then, during one of our regular stays in Nagano, we stumbled upon a German bakery, which completely took us by surprise.

They sell proper wood-fired oven bread. Light and aromatic on the inside. Crusty on the outside. The kind of bread that doesn’t apologise for itself. Every bite transports me straight back to my childhood – to that Alpine winter resort, that tiny bakery, that perfect loaf.

Pure nostalgia. In edible form.

The final twist?

The bakery has been there for nearly 30 years. We used to live just ten minutes away – and never knew it existed!

After almost three decades in Japan, I’ve finally found my holy grail.

It turns out it was waiting quietly in Nagano all along.