What Makes Panko Different From Regular Breadcrumbs?

In the early days of our relationship, back when we both still made charcuterie boards each time the other visited, I made my partner a dinner of rib eye, spinach, and macaroni and cheese.

I made sure to buy more expensive cheeses, to whisk the roux until it was smooth and thick, and to dial up the nutmeg and mustard powder for more zip. But when my partner paused after eating a serving or two, it was the topping that he asked me about. It was, I told him, slightly perplexed, just butter and panko.

The magic of panko

Home cooking is often a series of calculations in quality versus time: homemade broth or a store-bought carton, hand-pounded curry paste or a shelf-stable jar. And while you can usually taste the difference when making a trade-off of convenience, with panko, it often doesn’t feel like there is one at all.

I used to buy a loaf of bread when making mac and cheese, tear the bread from its crust, dry it in the oven, and then blitz it in the food processor. While there are certain tedious cooking tasks I find satisfying, I was always resentful of having to wash my food processor’s five component parts for a handful of crumbs.

These days, I grab a box of panko from the cabinet, pull apart the zipper seal of its silver pouch, and shake the contents out into a measuring cup. Unlike other store-bought breadcrumbs with their uniform, sandlike texture, panko’s pale flakes have an airy structure in varying sizes and shapes: some small, like the tiniest bits I used to scrape from the corners of my food processor, others longer shards with the distinct irregular crumb of actual bread. Pan-toasted in butter until nutty and golden brown and showered across a casserole, dredged on chicken pieces, or sprinkled over pasta like Italian pangrattato, panko’s shortcut to crunch can add a new dimension to so many dishes in so many different ways — no food processor required.

I’m certainly not original in embracing these Japanese breadcrumbs. In 2023, panko accounted for 38% of unit sales in the breadcrumb category, according to NielsenIQ — a 25% jump since 2019. At my local grocery store in Philadelphia, there are 10 varieties of panko in the bread aisle. Among them, of course, are Japanese brands like Kikkoman, but many American brands — Progresso, Aleia’s, Vigo, 4C — have their very own panko. Some make coconut, sriracha, and gluten-free varieties. Cento and Emeril’s even offer an Italian-seasoned panko. 

In my grocery store and beyond, panko has broken out of both the physical containment of the international aisle and the conceptual confines of a Japanese ingredient to be mostly used in Japanese foods. For many people in America, panko has seemingly become synonymous with breadcrumbs.

 A wartime invention

The story of how legions of boxes, bags, and canisters of panko ended up in many American cupboards starts with imperial Japan’s hubristic and ill-fated military campaigns in the early 20th century. Arguably, the dawn of panko might be traced back to the Mukden incident — the 1931 false flag operation that Japan staged as a pretext for invading Manchuria. Nathan Edwin Hopson, an associate professor at Norway’s University of Bergen and an expert in modern Japanese food history, told me that during that invasion, as well as those in Siberia, bread was quite popular in both the Japanese navy and army.

“They were looking for cooking methods that didn’t involve sending up a smoke signal that said, ‘Hello, could you please bomb me here?’” he said. “That’s notoriously a bad idea.” 

Making food discreetly was a priority for imperial Japan, with the full force of wartime urgency and unlimited resources behind it. To that end, a paymaster captain and inventor named Akutsu Shōzō designed an insulated wooden box cooker, fitted with electrode plates on the sides and bottom, that could pass an electric current through dough. This method cooked it rapidly and evenly, producing a light, crust-free bread — without a wisp of smoke or steam. In 1937, this cutting-edge oven was deployed with the Imperial Japanese Army’s First Independent Mixed Brigade to the front lines of Siberia and Manchuria.

After World War II, Hopson says, Japan had an excess supply of both wheat, from food aid, and electricity, from hydroelectric plants built during the war. Spotting an opportunity, companies like Sony started selling electrode bread machines, and, in the late 1950s, Nagoya’s Mikawa Denki Works developed a commercial version of them. By the 1960s, manufacturers discovered that the breadcrumbs produced by these tech-forward ovens had superior oil-draining properties. 

Breadcrumbs were certainly not new to Japan. Portuguese traders introduced bread to the country in 1543; the word panko is a derivation of pão, the Portuguese word for bread, and ko, the Japanese word for flour or powder. Breadcrumbs, according to Hopson, have been around on a commercial scale in Japan since 1907, when Maruyama Torakichi invented a bread-crushing machine for making them. But panko as we know it — fluffy, oblong and light, with a long-standing crunch — would come to be defined by Akutsu’s electrode oven.

In Japan today, manufacturers produce three kinds of panko with different moisture levels: nama panko (fresh breadcrumbs), semidorai or han-nama panko (semidried breadcrumbs), and kansō panko (dried breadcrumbs), which has a moisture content of 14% or less. Kansō panko, the dried kind that Americans are familiar with, is typically used the way Western breadcrumbs are in dishes like hambagu (a Japanese-style hamburger). Nama panko, meanwhile, is predominantly used in the fried foods industry, where its moisture content and larger crumb size add even more crunch and fluffiness.

Yukari Sakamoto, author of Food Sake Tokyo, notes that kansō panko is more prevalent in Japanese grocery stores; nama panko must be refrigerated once opened. Both are used for a variety of dishes (croquettes, fried cutlets like tonkatsu, gratins, meat patties, and more), but in her home, they don’t fry much. “We go out to eat for fried foods or buy them already fried and warm them up in the toaster oven.”

In the U.S., most Americans only know kansō panko — it’s the one kind we can buy, after all, and it’s been in the country for many decades now.

How panko took over American grocery stores

Soon after companies in Japan began producing dried panko on a commercial scale, stores in Japanese American enclaves began importing it. The earliest mention of it that I could find was in a 1967 bilingual advertisement in Venice, California’s Evening Vanguard: “Panko Bread Crumbs, 7 oz. box, 29¢.” The ingredient then began appearing in recipes in a handful of Asian American cookbooks, like William Shurtleff and Akiko Aoyagi’s 1975 The Book of Tofu and Martin Yan’s 1986 The Chinese Chef. 

Chefs and recipe developers, particularly those near Japanese American communities, rapidly adopted panko in a wide swath of dishes. Unlike miso or soy sauce, panko doesn’t have a distinct flavor that might challenge the newly initiated. There’s no learning curve for how to work with it — just a desire for better crunch. 

By the 1990s, Japanese breadcrumbs were starting to go mainstream in the U.S. The California Wine Country Cookbook (1991), for example, called for patting panko onto chicken breasts with a mixture of parsley and Parmesan. In December 1998, New York Times food writer Florence Fabricant introduced it to the paper’s general readership. “A Japanese product called panko sounds as if it might be the next toy craze,” she wrote. “But a kitchen craze is more like it.” 

Why chefs prefer panko — and the science behind its crunch

Susan Spungen, the founding food editor at Martha Stewart Living, remembers a time when you could find panko only in an Asian market. The now-classic Martha Stewart’s Hors d’Oeuvres Handbook, published in 1999, featured eggplant crisps made with oven-dried tomatoes, mozzarella, and panko. The headnote tersely warned against using other breadcrumbs: “If the crumbs are too fine, you will not achieve the light, airy texture of the Japanese version.” 

In those days, Google was in its infancy, and the cookbook, like many others, included a mail-order index to help intrepid home cooks locate harder-to-find ingredients, panko among them. “We really wanted to use it because it doesn’t get soggy,” Spungen told me of the hassle of buying panko then. “It’s so much better.” 

For Melissa Clark, a NYT Cooking columnist, panko solved what she saw as the modern flattening of the world of breadcrumbs. Older cookbooks, she said, called for more specificity: fresh, dried, coarse, or fine ones, depending on the dish. More finely ground breadcrumbs had a heavier consistency, akin to meat, that made them ideal for stretching out ground meat or stuffing vegetables. Fluffier fresh breadcrumbs added a lighter texture to a dish, while dried ones were essential for frying things. But panko scrambled these differentiations. 

“What’s so great about panko is you get the fluffiness and you get the dried quality,” says Clark of her now all-purpose crumb. “So you get this coating that is crisp and light at the same time.”

As for why panko performs differently, a representative for Kikkoman, one of the most ubiquitous panko brands in the U.S., told me via email that its “coarse texture allows [it] to retain less oil and coat without ‘packing’ like other breadcrumbs do, so they stay crispier longer and don’t get greasy or soggy when reheated.” That also means that when used in nonfried dishes, panko requires more hydration, which is why I like using butter, with its higher water content, rather than oil.

From specialty ingredient to pantry staple

While panko is technically a Japanese ingredient, its uses in traditional Japanese cuisine may be more limited. I couldn’t find a single recipe featuring it in my Japanese American grandparents’ old jam-packed recipe box. My grandparents didn’t make many fried dishes; my mother has no recollection of it being used in their West Chester, Pennsylvania, home when she was growing up in the 1960s. I also found no mention of panko in Shizuo Tsuji’s seminal 1980 classic, Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art, not even in the nearly 50-page ingredients section, which details kamaboko (fish paste), yuzu, and bean curd’s many forms. The katsu recipes simply called for “fresh or dry breadcrumbs.” 

Almost half a century later, my own overstuffed recipe binder, decorated by my partner’s daughter with now-peeling princess stickers, calls for panko on many different pages. There’s katsu, of course, but also cumin-spiced lamb meatballs and a mushroomy tuna casserole. At this very moment, I have chicken thighs luxuriating in buttermilk in the refrigerator, getting ready to be dredged in flour, egg, and panko for an oven-fried chicken with a golden-brown, crackling crisp skin that rivals actual fried versions. Panko is the sleeper agent in a surprisingly disproportionate number of our family favorites.

The only thing that has changed in the many meals we’ve shared since I first made that mac and cheese is that my partner is now so bold as to fight me for the leftovers. We both know that the panko topping will still be crunchy the next day.