All About Wagashi!

Have you ever eaten Japanese food?

Japanese foods like sushi, ramen, udon, and yakiniku are famous in Boston. Coming to Boston, I have been to some Japanese restaurants. The meals were so good. Actually, Japanese sweets are also delicious, did you know? Today, let me introduce you to Japanese traditional sweets, “wagashi.”

Wagashi are typically made of red bean paste, rice, and wheat, and are served with green tea. They look so wonderful and sometimes express the changing of the seasons. The craftsman makes them wholeheartedly by hand, so there are never any two that look the same and there are infinite variations. So, you can enjoy not only their taste but also their look.

What kind of wagashi are there?

There are one hundred different types of that. For example…

○Dorayaki

It is a sweet that puts red bean paste between two kinds of pancakes.

It is known as a food that Doraemon, which is a famous character in Japan likes.

○Dango

It is like a small rice cake.

It is eaten with red bean paste, soy sauce, or roasted soybean flour and is skewered to eat easily.

○Nerikiri

Nerikiri is a little expensive sweet, called an “art of work which can be eaten.”

It is formed like seasonal flowers or birds. For example, in this season, the concept of sweets that are shaped like pink flowers, plums, camellias, or a light green bird, a warbler in stores. 

○Manju

It is sweets which are red beans covering rice cakes. There are many kinds of that, for example, mame-daifuku which black beans with rice cake, kusu-daifuku which includes mugwort with rice cake, and ichigo-daifuku which includes strawberry with red bean paste.

Let’s cook!

Today, I share with you the “Kohakutou” recipe!  Kohakutou is sweets which is a characteristic of look reflected from the light sparkly and like a natural stone.

The looks amazed a lot of influencers and they uploaded it to Instagram and YouTube.

You must try it, too!

○Ingredients

・Agar 5g

・Water 150cc

・Sugar 300g

・Food colorings as needed

○Recipe

1. Mix agar and sugar in the pot.
2. Add water and heat the pot.
3. Mix them together.
4. When it comes to a boil, turn off the heat.
5. When melting the ager and sugar, put them in a  plastic container and cover them with cooking paper.
6. Put food colorings little by little, and mix slowly.
7. Put them in the fridge for a while.
8. When it is hardened, cut them to the proper size of natural stone using a knife or fork.
9. It’s all done!!

How did you like it? I hope you spend a wonderful time with wagashi and green tea this break!

• culture
• food
• japan
• Japanese culture
• Japanese food
• japanese sweets
• wagashi