Tag: adzuki

More of the little red beans!

I hesitated in doing an adzuki week but thought I would come dry of ideas quickly except from the many sweets… but we don’t eat so many. But discovering more and more recipes, maybe I should have had… another time!

So to change a bit from sweets I wanted a savory recipe to test and when browsing a Japanese cooking website I discovered recently I was immediately convinced that it was a perfect recipe for me: brown rice, sweet potato and adzuki! The simplicity of the ingredients, the seasonality of sweet potatoes 🍠 and the timeliness of me buying and cooking adzuki for the first time. (Really!! Can you imagine it took me 16 years to buy dry adzuki and cook with them!!!!)

The most common and popular recipe of savory adzuki is probably sekihan 赤飯 or literally red rice. The rice used for this preparation is usually mochi rice (sticky rice). It is served topped with black sesame and salt. It is often served for special occasions, but I think the most often I have had it was in bento bought in Tokyo or Ueno station… so for me it’s associated with train travel! 😉 That could still count as special occasions, more now that we haven’t traveled for a year, neither plane nor train… As I don’t buy normally mochi rice (but that too may change soon…) this option of recipe was excluded. Of course using regular Japanese rice would work too by slightly steaming longer… but the idea of adding sweet potatoes was just too tempting, I love sweet potatoes so much!!! So here is the recipe, easy as can be and each ingredient perfectly balanced and the flavors harmoniously enhanced. You can replace the brown rice with white rice, but it will change the texture balance of the overall. Taste will still be ok of course!

Sweet potato and adzuki rice (2 servings)

  • 1go (150g) of brown rice
  • 10-15g of dry adzuki
  • 1 sweet potato (not a big one!)
  • a pinch of salt
  • a pinch of sesame seeds

Rince the adzuki, set in a pan (that can be used for cooking the rice as well, so non sticky is nice), and cover with 1.5cm of water, bring to a boil and boil at medium heat for 5min. Wash and dice the sweet potato. Add the brown rice and the sweet potato and the salt to the adzuki pan, stir a bit and cover with water to obtain enough liquid to cook the brown rice (that will depend on your pan, your cooking range and the lid you are using. I usually add water to double the height in the pan, plus a bit for brown rice, but I do every thing about). Cook under a lid at low heat until the liquid is all absorbed and the rice is soft. Serve and top with a bit of sesame seeds.

Kintsuba

Sorry for the delay! I was hoping to publish it much earlier but then I got busy with work and I am struggling with wordpress and jetpack… technical issues that are getting more and more annoying.

So to continue with adzuki, there are a few more recipes I would like to share, and as promised on IG, kintsuba was one of them. It’s a slightly more elaborated recipe of wagashi than those with just anko and mochi or shiratama. I like it very much for the variations that exist, it can be with sweet potatoes, including walnuts etc… so many options… I like it also for its very graphic visual. It’s a little square “cake”. Kintsuba consists of a soft and melting jelly and a thin cooked skin. Making kintsuba is simple but takes a bit of rest time as it uses agar agar and it takes 2h for it to solidify. Then there is a frypan cooking step to finalize them. But they are really delicious and worth trying.

Kintsuba also uses an ingredient that is often used in Japanese sweets: shiratamako. It’sa kind of rice flour but made from cooked mochi rice.

Kintsuba (4 pieces)

For the beans jelly

  • 100g of tsubuan or anko
  • 25ml of water
  • 1g of agar agar

For the skin

  • 25g of wheat flour
  • 5g of shiratamako
  • 60ml of water
  • A bit of cooking oil to grease the pan

First of all the jelly. It’s quick to make but as I said it takes about 2h for the agar agar to stiffen so better do this step ahead. Once you have the rest is rather quick.

In a pan heat the water and the agar agar, stir well, when it comes to a boil lower the heat and continue stirring for 2min. Add the anko or tsubuan prepared before hand as in the recipe here. Continue stirring for 5min at low heat. Then move the paste into a dish that is square ideally. I use a Japanese tofu and jelly stainless steel dish for that specific use (see below picture). The jelly should be 1-2cm thick in the dish. Let cool down and refrigerate for 2h. That’s it for the jelly. You can eat it once it has stiffen as a jelly.

Once the jelly is stiff, take it out of the fridge, cut it into 4 pieces of 4x4cm approximately. In a bowl mix the ingredients for the skin. If you use shirotamako, you will need to crush it to powder it. It’s very easy. Stir well. Heat a fry pan and grease it. Now dip one face of a square in the skin dough and put this face down in the pan. Cook until that side is dry and no longer sticky. Repeat for each side. If you think your skin is too thin, apply a second layer. You can eat right away or keep a few days in the fridge.

  • Preparing the jelly
  • Jelly stiff and skin dough ready
  • Cooking the skin
  • Ready to eat!

The magic of the little red beans

One thing I have very rarely talked about here is adzuki – 小豆 literally small bean. They are present in many Japanese recipes and in most of the Japanese sweets. In fact beans are an important staple in Japanese cuisine: to name only a few the soya beans or daizu 大豆 literally big beans, the traditional jumbo black beans or kuromame 黒豆 for new year and of course the tiny adzuki!

raw adzuki beans

These little beans are usually cooked with sugar and salt to make tsubuan 粒あん when the beans are kept almost whole, or anko あんこ when the beans are puréed into an homogenous paste. The paste of tsubuan and anko is then used in many preparations: yokan, dorayaki, daifuku, ohagi, kintsuba, oshiruko…

Today let me introduce the basic recipe for anko and tsubuan and of oshiruko お汁粉, one of the traditional new year “soup”. Even though adzuki are dried beans they cook in 1h only so they are surprisingly easy to use.

Anko and tsubuan (makes 500g which is a lot!)

  • 200g of dry adzuki
  • 200g of brown sugar
  • Water
  • A pinch of salt

Rince the beans and put them in a pan, cover with water, bring to a boil, then decrease the heat to keep a steady boiling for 5min. Then drain the beans and throw the water. Return the beans to the pan and cover with ample water and bring to a boil again. Cook at medium heat for 40min, until the beans are almost soft. Drain the beans, throw the water, return the beans to the pan, add the sugar and cook at low heat and stir gently until the remaining moisture is gone. Add a pinch of salt. For the tsubuan that’s it. For anko you need to purée to obtain a paste.

Oshiruko (1 serving)

  • 50g of anko or tsubuan
  • 15cl of water
  • A small piece of semi-dry mochi to grill

In a pan heat the bean paste and the water to obtain a kind of thick soup. In the meantime grill the mochi. Serve the soup, add the mochi and enjoy!!! Beware that the soup, because of the sugar can be really hot.

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