The act of cooking is one of ritual necessity and enduring care. Recipes, in their nature, like stories being told, have the wonderful ability to evolve and to be reimagined, but we can often trace an experience with food back to its origins with a single bite or aroma. At Ayako & Family, our purpose is held by the very word "preservation," as we capture a moment in time for later cherishing, whether it be through summer fruit spooned out like sunshine underneath a cool winter sky, or a slice of warm bread to harken a time when we were a bit more carefree.

Shokupan, a Japanese style of white bread, is what we ate for breakfast as children growing up in Japan; scooped up at the train station bakery already sliced and prepared by our grandmother sometimes without so much as margarine and a dusting of raw sugar. We have developed a recipe that honors this memory, while introducing whole, farm-focused ingredients such as bread flour from Smalls Family Farm, an eighth-generation mill in Walla Walla, Washington and Oregon Tilth certified high fat butter. Our bread is currently available exclusively at our farmers market locations.