Mari Ishiguro/石黒茉莉さん established a record by winning her second consecutive First Prize at the 6th National High School Bread Contest fielding 176 participants from all over Japan!
On the 21st and 22nd of January 2012 the 6th National High School Bread Contest took place in the City of Izu No Kuni in the Izu Peninsula, Shizuoka Prefecture!
Mari who had won last year’s contest with a “Toma Kara Feuille”/”Tomato Mille-Feuilles” did it again with a ‘Toma Kan Pan” creation!

The concept of the bread was indeed an interesting combination of European and Asian cuisines:
“Toma” stands for “tomato” as dried ones were extensively used.
Note that tomatoes were a prerequisite ingredient in submitted recipes as the Government is actively promoting the culture of this vegetable!
“Kan” stands for “kanten/寒天/agar agar” in Japanese with which the bread was coated!
“Pan” stands for bread in Japanese.

Mari Ishiguro is a third year student at the Shizuoka Prefectural Agricultural High School and will graduate next month before attending Cooking College in Tokyo.
The bread might be small but it took no less than 5 hours to prepare and bake!

Cross section of a frozen sample

Creating the bread with a dough surrounding another dough containing dried tomatoes and walnuts took 3 and a half hours, while the coating with agar agar took an hour. Add to this 35 minutes for baking, the whole work took no less than 5 hours!
According to Mari, this year’s concept was totally different from last year’s approach as she wanted to create a bread/cake that could be appreciated chilled.
Moreover, instead of using water in the dough she utilized the natural juice of real tomatoes.
She also compensated the astringency with cocoa powder.
Finally she topped the bread with dried tomatoes before baking it!
She agreed that her “bread” was more a dessert than anything else!

All this creative work was made possible under the teaching of her Bakery Teacher, Tetsuya Ishida/石田哲也!
Mari and her teacher (and all the students and their students) have the chance to belong to a very progressive high school by Japanese standards which emphazises vocational studies above all!

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