Wagashi

Wagashi is a traditional Japanese sweet usually made with natural, plant-based ingredients and a whole lot of sugar. Yesterday I got to attend a class to try out making two different kinds: manjuu, and nerikiri.

Manjuu, according to our handout, comes in many varieties. But the general formula is an outside made from flour, rice powder, and buckwheat with a filling of an (red bean paste - 30% boiled azuki beans, 70% sugar!).

First, the cooking school teacher showed us how to do it. First things first, mix your sugar, flour, baking soda, and water to make your outside dough/paste.
Then, with that done, you let it sit while you divide up the an (red bean paste) into even-sized balls.

Then you divide up your outer dough into the same number of pieces as you have an pieces.
Then you wrap your outer dough around the an balls, which is a lot harder than it sounds and a lot harder than he makes it look in this video clip.
(And yes, I epic failed when making this video clip. But there are two solutions.
1. Touch your right ear to your right shoulder. Click play.
2. Turn your computer screen 90 degrees counter-clockwise. Click play.)

After that, you put your manjuu in this wooden box with slats on the bottom (and a thin piece of damp cloth) and spray them with a bit of water.
They then get steamed for 8 minutes in this contraption at the back of the room.
While the demonstration manjuu were steaming, the teacher set us loose to attempt our own manjuu.

Our tools of destruction

Perfectly good ingredients about to be victimized by our inexpert manjuu-making skills

Thankfully someone remembered to close the window before we did this step. (It was pretty gusty--you can imagine how this would have ended if it had been open... though I would have been able to get some pretty funny pictures...)


Caitlin does not seem to confident of her sugar and water mixing skills...

Folding the dough until it has the consistency of an earlobe. No, seriously, that's how he described it. He asked us what English word we had for that consistency and we realized that there really was no word. Epic fail, English, epic fail.

Spraying the manjuu before they get steamed.

The completed product looks pretty much like it does above, so I haven't included another picture. Also, they were delicious. Go team!

Next up was nerikiri. It has the same filling of red bean paste, but the outer paste is made of a mix of Gyuhi (a soft type of mochi) and Shiro Koshi An (bean paste made from navy beans and greyish off-white in color). It is typically used like clay to make decorative-looking wagashi. We added food coloring to the ones we did to make them pink.

Once again, we had the demonstration by the master who made it look easy and did the whole process in about 2 seconds flat.

I took this picture of the mirror behind the demonstration counter. It lets you see a different perspective of what's going on up front. The two pink things in front of him are the nerikiri in progress.

Then we were set loose once again to try our hand at it. It was pretty simple. You wrapped the red bean paste with the pink nerikiri paste and then shaped that ball into something pretty like so:

This was my final product:
And then me and the final product. :)

Yay! It happened in a kitchen and I didn't screw it up!

Last picture of the day is some fancy nerikiri that they put out for us to ogle.