Baking was always a shared hobby for business owners Joshua and Skye Nakamura, but they only did a “deep dive” into it this year.
“Skye always enjoyed baking cookies and cakes for her friends, while I grew up eating amazing bread baked by my mom,” Joshua Nakamura says. “My mom taught me how to make her very popular shokupan — Japanese milk bread — a few years ago, and I supplied that bread to a local katsu restaurant.
“After I started baking for our friends and family, that very quickly snowballed into (creating) Naks Pan,” he adds.
The Nakamuras’ Naks Pan business started around March. The mascots on the logo features the “bread-ified” versions of their dogs, Hana and Libby, according to Nakamura, who says they took the required Department of Health food safety course, per home food standards.
“A lot of my friends refer to me as Josh Naks, and ‘pan’ is the Japanese borrowed word for bread,” he says. “Put those together and you get Naks Pan.”
The business offers shio pan, or salt bread, and cream pan. The breads are known for soft, pillowy texture, according to Nakamura.
“Salt bread is the viral, originally Japanese, bread roll that’s taking over Korea,” he says. “It combines the best contrasts of both texture and flavor — it’s sweet and salty, while also being pillowy soft and super crunchy all at the same time.
“There’s a little piece of butter in the middle (for the shio pan),” he adds. “If you watch any social media videos on shio pan, it’s a roll with a little piece of butter, and then as it bakes, the butter melts out. It keeps the inside (of the roll) nice and moist.”
The shio pan comes in flavors like the OG ($4), ube cheezu ($6), pan au chocolat ($5), garlic cheezu ($5), and its newest flavor, ham and chib, or ham and cheese ($6).
“I would say our most popular flavor would be the ube shio pan, which has the same dough with ube flavoring and is also stuffed with our homemade ube halaya,” Nakamura says. “The ham and chib has a piece of a ham (inside) and little Dachshund cut-out of cheese on the top.
“The OG shio pan has a little piece of butter in the middle,” he adds. “The shio pan au chocolat is like a play on words, like pain au chocolat, the chocolate croissant; I just added the word ‘shio’ in front. It has a piece of chocolate in the middle and chocolate shavings on top.”
The business’s cream pan is Japanese-style bun stuffed with custard. The dessert is light and delicate without being overly sweet.
“Our version comes with three distinct homemade custard flavors,” Nakamura says. “I developed the recipes so that it fits as much custard as possible. Our cream pan flight ($12) comes with one of each flavor — vanilla, matcha and ube. Some of our most loyal cream pan customers really love the ube cream pan, so we offer a mix-and-match option to fulfill their ube cravings.”
Naks Pan currently does pastry drops on Saturdays. Customers can see the menu and order via hotplate.com for pick-up in Kakaʻako.
“We try to have a drop every Saturday; we may also do Sunday drops if there’s a special occasion, or if there’s enough interest for it,” Nakamura says.
The business will be popping up at the Taste of Aloha at Waterfront Plaza on Saturday, July 11. Since that market will have a matcha theme, the biz will be featuring a new matcha shio pan with azuki inside.
Naks Pan is looking to pop up at more markets, according to Nakamura.
“We appreciate the opportunity we’ve been given to feed our community,” he says. “The best part of our days is hearing and seeing how happy people are, after they consume our bread.
“Naks Pan is a home bakery that’s only run by Skye and I,” he adds. “I’m typically baking along on Saturday, and if things go wrong, I tend to scramble to correct them. We hold ourselves to a very high standard so our customers get the very best bite of bread that we can provide.”
CONTACT
Naks Pan
Instagram: @naks.pan
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Kelli Shiroma Braiotta can be reached at kelli@alohastatedaily.com.
