Sourdough baked slowly, for keeps
Every loaf at Pixel Crown begins three days before it reaches your hands, and that time is the only ingredient we cannot substitute.
How to get bread
News & Announcements
Baking with chestnut flour in autumn: what to expect
Chestnut flour has been used in bread and pasta in parts of Europe for centuries, but it is less common in Japanese baking. It has no gluten of its own, which means it must be blended with wheat flour to produce a dough that holds together. The ratio of chestnut to wheat determines not just the flavour but the entire handling character of the dough, and getting it wrong produces a loaf that is either too dense or too fragile to score.
Read more →Why cold fermentation makes better sourdough bread
Most home bakers in Japan who try sourdough for the first time are surprised by how long the process takes. A same-day loaf is possible, but it rarely has the depth of flavour that makes sourdough worth the effort. The cold fermentation step, where shaped dough rests in the refrigerator for one to three nights, is the part of the process that changes everything.
Read more →Keeping a sourdough starter alive in a Japanese home
A sourdough starter is a living culture, and living things respond to their environment. In Japan, where kitchen temperatures can swing from 10°C in winter to 32°C in summer, a feeding schedule that works in March will not work in August. This is one of the first things Noriko Miyazaki covers in the Pixel Crown workshop, because it is the thing that causes the most home-baker frustration.
Read more →What regulars say
“I have been picking up the country loaf every Friday for almost two years. My family goes through it by Sunday and I find myself rationing the last slice.
Keiko Tanaka · Weekly subscriber, Chikusa
“The rye and malt loaf is the only bread I have found in Nagoya that actually tastes like the bread I ate in Germany. Dense, dark, and it keeps well.
Thomas Brauer · Regular customer
These two notes come from regulars who agreed to be quoted. A loaf changes a little with the season and the week, so yours may taste different.
Who we are, plainly
Noriko Miyazaki
Noriko Miyazaki spent eight years as a pastry chef at a French-Japanese restaurant in Kyoto before a long stay in the Alsace region of France changed how she thought about bread. She came back to Japan in 2017 with a single jar of levain and a notebook full of margin notes on hydration ratios. After two years of baking out of a rented kitchen in Nagoya's Chikusa ward, she opened Pixel Crown in 2019. She mills a portion of her own flour using a stone tabletop mill sourced from a workshop in Gifu, and she keeps a strict no-additive rule that she has never once bent. On days off she tends a small kitchen garden behind her apartment, growing shiso and myoga that occasionally find their way into seasonal loaves.
Common questions
Q.How far in advance do I need to place my order?
Orders for Friday pickup close every Tuesday at noon. If you miss that window, the next opportunity is the following Tuesday. Subscription customers are reserved automatically each week and do not need to reorder, but variety changes require 72 hours' notice.
Q.Can I pay by credit card, or is cash required?
Bank transfer (furikomi) is accepted before Thursday for single-loaf orders. At pickup, cash and PayPay are both fine. Credit cards are not currently accepted at the counter. Subscription billing is handled monthly via bank transfer.
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