Welcome to the Bon Appétit Bake Club, a community of curious bakers. Each month senior Test Kitchen editors Jesse Szewczyk and Shilpa Uskokovic share a must-make recipe and dive deep into why it works. This month we welcome deputy food editor Hana Asbrink to be our guest baker. Come bake and learn with us—and don’t forget to join the Bake Club group chat over on Substack. The version of this recipe that appeared in our November 2026 print issue has the incorrect bake time listed.
The recipe that follows features the correct total bake times of 15–18 minutes (please see step 8). Salt bread is a wondrous buttery roll known as shio pan in Japanese or sogeum ppang in Korean. It originated in Japan in 2014 and quickly became popularized in Korea soon thereafter, taking off in the post-Covid era around 2021. It’s formed by rolling each ball of dough around a nub of salted butter.
As it bakes, the butter melts and oozes out of the bun, “frying” and crisping up the bottom. If you can imagine a warm dinner roll meeting a flaky croissant, you’re getting closer. You’ll often find a range of salt bread, some leaning closer to sturdy bread with a tighter crumb and others resembling a softer milk bread. In all salt bread cases, there are a few key identifiers: (1) a deeply golden exterior, with the aforementioned crisp bottom; (2) the signature hollow in the middle (where the pat of butter once stood) when you tear the bun in half; and (3) a sprinkle of flaky or coarse salt atop the bun.
In this riff, I use an enriched dough, bringing in qualities of a soft milk bread into the mix. With the bread flour, the end result is a lovely, crowd-pleasing bun that’s great for snacking on its own or enjoying alongside a special holiday meal. If there’s one note to highlight: Ensure you are starting with a fresh pack of instant (or “rapid-rise”) yeast. This will make all the difference in the rise and the eventual yield.
Source: www.bonappetit.com
