Kansai & Osaka · Dessert
Mitarashi Dango
- Intermediate
- 30 min
- roughly 1 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
- Vegan
Leads with a sweet edge rounding the corners, char used as punctuation, finishing long and savory.
Ingredients
- 100 g joshinko (non-glutinous rice flour)
- 100 g shiratamako (glutinous rice flour)
- 180 ml hot water
- 100 ml water
- 60 g sugar
- 30 ml koikuchi soy sauce
- 15 ml mirin
- 10 g katakuriko or kudzu starch slaked in 20 ml water
Equipment
Grill
The skills inside
Reducing a sauceRoasting in a hot ovenSalted water & the float testBlanching & shocking
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · soy · alcohol
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Rub the two rice flours together, work in the hot water a little at a time, and knead until the dough is as soft as an earlobe and stops cracking at the edges when rolled.
- Roll 15 g balls, boil until they float, give them two minutes more, then drop them into iced water so the surface firms.
- Thread four to a skewer and dry them thoroughly on a cloth; a wet dango steams instead of blistering.
- Grill dry over a naked flame or on a bare pan, turning, until brown blisters patch the surface and the skin squeaks under the tongs.
- Simmer the water, sugar, mirin and koikuchi soy, used here for colour and roast where the rest of this chapter uses usukuchi, then rain in the starch slurry while whisking.
- Cook the glaze until it turns from cloudy to glossy and coats a spoon, then spoon it over the hot skewers and serve at once.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Roasting in a hot oven 56 recipes
- The oven was fully up to heat before anything went in, given time beyond the indicator light rather than judged by it.
- Every piece has air around it. Nothing touches its neighbour and nothing is packed to the edge of the tray, because crowded food steams itself in its own moisture and never browns.
- Colour is even across the whole tray, the tray having been turned at least once: no pale row at the back and no dark row at the front.
- It came out BEFORE the target temperature, not at it. Carryover keeps driving the inside up by several degrees after it leaves the oven, and that rise is part of the cooking rather than an error in it.
- The temperature was read at the coldest part rather than the easiest one to reach, and read again after the rest.
Where it goes wrong The tray was crowded, or the oven was not truly up to heat. The food releases steam faster than a cool box can carry it away, so it sits pale and slack, and the extra minutes spent chasing colour take the inside well past where it should have stopped.
Blanching & shocking 76 recipes
- A large volume at a hard rolling boil, and enough of it that adding the food barely interrupts it; a pot that goes quiet has started stewing rather than blanching.
- Timed rather than watched, and short. This is an interruption in the cooking of something, not the cooking of it.
- The ice bath was made and standing beside the pot BEFORE anything went into the water, not started once the timer went off.
- It went straight into the ice water, fully submerged, and stayed until cold at the centre: a piece still warm inside is still cooking, and the arrest has not happened yet.
- Drained and dried afterwards rather than left sitting in water, so it does not carry that water into whatever it meets next.
Where it goes wrong The ice bath was not ready, so the food sat draining in a colander while its own residual heat carried on cooking it. By the time it cooled it was a stage past where it was pulled, and exact arrest is the entire reason for blanching rather than simply boiling.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Sauternes
- Also Right
- Demi-sec Champagne
- From the Taps
- Belgian tripel
- Zero-Proof
- Jasmine tea
The sweetness rule is absolute: the pour must be sweeter than the plate, and acid keeps it from cloying.
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