Kyoto & Kaiseki · Dessert
Warabimochi
- Intermediate
- 25 min
- roughly 1 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
- Vegan
A quiet dish that lets its main ingredient speak: season well and stand aside.
Ingredients
- 100g hon-warabiko, true bracken starch
- 450ml water
- 50g caster sugar
- 60g kinako
- 5g Uji matcha
- 10g icing sugar
- 100g kurozato black sugar
- 60ml water, for the kuromitsu
Equipment
Sheet pan
The skills inside
Blanching & shockingStraining & passing through a sieve
Allergen screen
None found among the 14 screened.
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
- Melt the kurozato in its water over a low heat to a loose syrup and leave it to cool. Sift the kinako with the matcha and icing sugar.
- Whisk the warabiko, sugar and water together cold until no grit drags on the whisk, then pass it through a sieve; true bracken starch comes in hard lumps.
- Cook over a medium heat, stirring without stopping. It goes from milk white to grey and lumpy in patches, then pulls together into one mass.
- Once it is translucent all through, keep working it over the heat another three to five minutes until it is glossy and heavy on the spatula. This is the step people cut short.
- Drop spoonfuls into ice water for half a minute, or pour into a wetted tray and cut with a wet scraper. Roll in the kinako and matcha, and pour the kuromitsu at the table.
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.
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.
Straining & passing through a sieve 148 recipes
- Nothing solid got through: a finger drawn through what came out finds no fibre, seed, skin, curd, or grit.
- Where the dish wants body it was worked through rather than left to drip, and the solids left in the mesh are spent and dry rather than still holding liquid worth having.
- It is judged on the tongue rather than by eye: smooth, with no residual grain left behind after the mouthful has gone.
- The mesh was fine enough for the job and held its shape, and nothing bypassed it by going over the rim.
- The yield is close to what went in less the spent solids: not half of it abandoned in the sieve because it stopped running and nobody pushed.
Where it goes wrong It was pushed through a mesh too coarse for it, or the sieve was overloaded and slopped at the rim, so the fibres it was meant to remove are in the finished sauce and it reads grainy on the tongue.
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.
Saved on this device and kept across visits: export from My Menu to move them.