gonna grow you a place safer than this

so i dont usually go on reddit

but has someone on the dungeon meshi subreddit figured out more detailed recipe amounts of the pan-steamed bread that senshi makes in the orc episode?

once we run low on bread in my household I wanna make some anime-ass bread

This was gonna be a comment but it got too long.

So looking at the process, the steaming is completely incidental to the main cooking - it's the final step and I'm… genuinely not sure what it's doing. You do not steam baked goods at the end because it turns the crust rubbery.

I think what Senshi is actually doing is closer to baking - the vessel that far from the fire is as close to indirect heat as you're going to manage without an oven. I think what the writer means by "steaming," because we don't see him add any water to the pot neither in, is just letting the bread finish "baking" in the vessel. To get the finished product I think you actually want a dutch oven here.

And sure enough, if you google "campfire dutch oven bread" you get a very credible approximation of Senshi's final loaf.

You'd have to tweak it for a home oven and getting the "buns", but that process should yield you what you're looking for.

The extra bit of confusion is that the anime calls for "strong flour" in the English subs, which doesn't appear in the English dub, nor any scanlations I can find. That's broadly "bread flour" (as I'm sure you know, I'm just explaining for others), but the inconsistency is interesting. I'm also not convinced that bread flour is best for this.

If anyone has access to the original manga, they could check if Senshi says "強力粉" (strong/bread flour) or report what version of "粉" he uses.

okay so disclaimer that I'm not a professional baker first but:

gave me an incredibly close visual representation of senshi's camp bread, and the new place I've moved into has a small backyard and one of the household's miniature bbq seems to be back there.

It's winter right now but I could theoretically get some charcoal briquettes and do this as close as possible to the anime bread without having to light actual fires.

the next issue is this:

vs

now, it's not the yeast adjustment that has me, since I know by vibes at this point how to raise starters and levains to make up for volume and bacterial culture differences.

it's the milk and eggs.

one of the defining things about rolls, I find, is the softness that milk and butter add. senshi's recipe barely has any fat in it other than the olive oil from the fire trap, so I'd be losing a lot of softness. His recipe doesn't have egg either, so I'd be losing structure.

in addition to that, the liquid:flour ratio is very different. Roll recipes usually have around a 1:3 liquid to flour ratio (eg 0.5Cwater+1.5Cmilk:6C flour). I don't know what hydration level Senshi's starter is at but it looks pretty 1:1 from the comic and anime, meaning that his has around TWICE the liquid in it proportionally, since 160:250 is abouuut 1:1.5

......

you see THIS IS WHY I WAS HOPING SOME SUBREDDITOR FIGURED IT OUT FOR ME

I JUST DROPPED EVERYTHING TO DO M A T H

I sense an opportunity to pass on one of the greatest lessons my Scoutmaster taught me!

Counting coals for Dutch ovens is the normal method, but it's also really inconsistent! Different size lumps or briquettes, coals getting smaller as they burn down, etc! So here's what you should do instead: Rings!

Basically make a ring around the perimeter of your Dutch oven under the bottom, and then put the listed number of rings on the top! You'll get much more consistent heat, and better cooking results!!

This blog post goes into additional detail if you want it!

were doing this folks were making this happen

also I know @bitternest irl so we're gonna have a proper go at trying to get close to senshi bread as possible without fucking up its structure some time this week fingers crossed

Okay so, prelimnary-POC-that-I-didn't-think-would-work: done.

It, uh. Worked.

I legit cobbled this recipe together out of three separate ones, so there's a lot of room to improve, but here it is:

Ingredients

Steps (notice: if you don't have a stand mixer, I'm sorry, I'm useless at kneading and haven't done so manually in over a decade):

I think the double proof did the majority of the legwork here. The dutch oven is good for getting good steam early on, which is important for crust development and airiness, but there's no way in hell it would turn out this light and fluffy without a 2nd proof.

If others want to try variations, go nuts. Tomorrow I'll post the version of this made by a baker buddy using tangzhong, which was a "breakthrough" realization before this fucking recipe just... worked?!?!

Anyways, happy baking

wholly shit, TRULY

just fully processed that fleki dungeon meshi is canonically bare ass bare pussying it. that's sof ucking funny

ryoko kui likes to pay attention to lots of important little minor character design details. like how fleki has her whole bare ass naked cartoon butt and entire vagina hanging out at all times.

get your bare ass OFF of that chair!!!!

The secret Dungeon Meshi sauce that's getting people to eat better is that it's so non-judgmental. Senshi and the rest of the gang never talk about what not to eat besides things that taste bad and literal poison. They don't even talk about "health" that much besides the importance of a balanced diet. It's so much easier to eat well when you think of food simply as something your body needs, and that it's often worth the extra effort to make it taste good, especially when you understand how to connect "things your body needs" with "things that taste good"

I love that when marcille says she really wants some cured ham senshi says "oh that means your body is craving fat which is actually a very good and normal thing. Let's go kill a snake chicken and have a picnic."

One thing people get immediately about Dungeon Meshi is that so much of it is about Dungeons and Dragons. I think a less discussed thing is Dungeon Meshi is also very much about backpacking.

I used to backpack for a living as part of my job and the logistics of how much food I could carry was very much a limiting factor of how far we could get in a week before we had to turn around.

We had to do so much planning about food, I counted calories for the first time in my life not to lose weight but to establish a bare minimum of how much food I needed. I started with 2000 calories before realizing that they decided that number was an average for people who hiked way less then 8 hours in a day. I went up to 2400 calories a day, I would have done more but reasonably I could only carry so much food on my back. I made sure a good portion of it was salty because after the first day my sweat would taste like water and if I didn't pack enough gatorade powder my legs would cramp. Pringles have never tasted as good as they would on day 3 of a hike when my body craved salt the most, at home they were disappointing. Food was about what my body needed and what would let me keep hiking.

I would often train new volunteers and impressing upon them how much food they needed to pack and how they needed to think about it differently was always hard. The hardest was young woman. They would tell me they only ate 1400 calories in a day, they were never hungry after that, they couldn't possibly eat that much. They always listened to me in the second week. No one ever brought enough in the first week man or women.

The logistics of carrying enough food was a frequent topic, we discussed yes, if we were going to a lake, could we fish? Would that be reliable, could we save pack weight and money (dehydrated food is expensive) on that? We would talk about what fresh ingredients we could bring, how long they would keep, how we could cook them. Like a lot of adventurers mention when running into Laio's party, the kind of dried food that goes well in a backpack wears on you after a while, you want something actually cooked, not dried or at best rehydrated. The problems about food they discuss in the manga are the exact same problems I have sat around and discussed with people I worked on the trail with.

Dungeon meshi is about taking care of yourself physically so you can be fucking insane at full capacity