Nara is famous for deer and temples, but you won’t find either of those inside this hard-to-find baked good.

Most of the time, the names of baked goods in Japan are pretty self-explanatory. Curry bread is bread filled with curry. Yakisoba bread is a bun filled with stir-fried noodles (yakisoba). Nara Bread is…wait, what is Nara Bread?

Nara, of course is the name of the city most famous for its deer, which freely roam the grounds of Nara Park (and sometimes, apparently, wander over to the neighboring prefecture). However, we can put your mind at ease right away and let you know that no Nara deer are used in the making of Nara bread – venison isn’t commonly eaten in Japan, and especially in Nara, the creatures are seen as cohabitants, not food.

Making Nara bread even more mysterious is that you can’t just walk into a bakery anywhere in Japan and buy some. As a matter of fact, even within Nara there’s only one place you can find it, and it’s not anywhere close to Nara Park. Nara Bread is exclusively sold at the Hari Terrace michi no eki roadside local products souvenir shop, which is about 40 minutes from Nara Park by car.

▼ Hari Terrace

And yet, Nara Bread is incredibly popular, selling out on a daily basis. Our Japanese-language reporter has made multiple attempts to try it, but each and every time she stopped by, the staff told her that she was too late, and the day’s stock was already all gone. Finally, though, on her most recent attempt, there was a whole bunch of the stuff!

▼ ならパン = Nara Bread

This isn’t because Nara Bread has fallen out of favor with bread fans, though. Quite the opposite, as Masami lucked out on a rare day when the store had a second batch of bread, which had just been put out on the shelf a few minutes before she arrived.

No way was Masami going to let this chance pass her by, so she swiftly grabbed a 280-yen (US$1.80) load and hurried home for taste-testing.

Nara Bread has a firm crust and, from the outside, looks sort of like a compact baguette. After taking hers home, Masami warmed it up in her toaster oven for just a bit, and before taking a bite, she opened it up so that we can see that Nara Bread is…

…filled with Nara-zuke, or Nara-style pickles!

Nara-zuke is made by taking vegetables or fruits, such as cucumber, white melon, ginger, or even watermelon, and soaking them in miso, salt, and sake lees. The resulting flavor profile combines a pronounced saltiness with aspects of rice and sake, and also a sake-like aroma, though the pickles remain non-alcoholic. Nara Bread also adds a bit of mayo to the mixture.

Masami was honestly a little apprehensive about how well something so traditionally Japanese as Nara-style pickles would work with the decidedly Western elements of bread and mayonnaise, but together they turned out to be a thoroughly enjoyable combination. There’s a delightful crunch to both the bread and pickles, and the mayo takes just a bit of sharpness off of the pickles’ flavor, so that all of the different tastes are tied comfortably together. Distinctly flavorful in a mature manner, Masami thinks Nara Bread is equally well-suited as a breakfast side dish, between-meal snack, or even as something to munch on a piece of while having an after-work beer, cocktail, or cup of sake.

As mentioned above, Nara Bread is, at the moment, only available at the Hari Terrace souvenir shop, which is located next to the Hari Interchange of the Meihan Expressway, which connects Osaka and Nagoya, so it’s something to put on you souvenir shopping list if you’re traveling in that part of Japan.

Related: Hari Terrace official website
Photos ©SoraNews24
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