Behold, three kanji, progressing in complexity until you have to enlarge your screen to read the last one: 水羊羹. You might see this mysterious word spelled in other, simpler ways, like 水ようかん. The transliteration is, with or without the space, mizu yōkan or mizu yokan for the macron disinclined/challenged/lazy. Whichever way you spell it (or draw it, I'm not always sure which verb to use), the word only means one thing. Jello. More or less.
Ingredients
But it's not just any kind of jello -- it's vegan jello, with a very "East Asian" flavor of red bean paste (aka anko, which you can draw/spell 餡子).
The gelatin is the magical, sets-at-room-temperature agar-agar, or to use the Japanese name, kanten (whose kanji looks like this: 寒天 -- wait, that looks like "cold heaven"...well, there's something to look into.).
The other ingredient is water... and sugar, depending on the recipe. Looks like adding chestnuts is allowed, but they're not absolutely necessary, and I think that might actually be kuri yokan.
After poured into a pan with corners, chilled (yes, chilled, there is a reason, just keep reading) and set, it's cut into squares or rectangular cuboids/bars (at least that's what I've seen) and looks like this lovely drawing I whipped together in MS Paint:
I actually only managed to get the little dessert pitchfork's angles right on accident. Yeah, the sky's a little big, but oh well. Stare at it long enough and you can start to see the darker shade I used for the edges.
Classification and History
Mizu yōkan is actually a sub-variety of the dessert yōkan or 羊羹 -- its name means "water yōkan '. (It looks like there are two other versions, neri yōkan or 練り羊羹, which uses more anko, and mushi yōkan or 蒸し羊羹. The only specific thing I know about mushi yōkan is that it's steamed.)
It has a history of the "centuries old" variety (yōkan's ancestor was a meat sub from China first eaten in Japan by the country's Zen monk community), but I'll save the details for a general yōkan post, which this one was turning into, before I managed to put a stop to it, unlike this sentence.
There is of course, a seasonal guideline for eating mizu yōkan. You're supposed to eat it when it's summer outside. However, in a recipe video by Ochikeron (which I've put a little below this in the Recipes section), she adds a little to this: in Fukui prefecture, there's a tradition of eating it when the weather's cold.
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| For those among us (myself included) who had no idea where it was. |
Recipes
Below are some recipe videos that I looked at. The first, from Cooking with Dog, looks unusual and pretty because they used little half-spheres as molds. But the recipe said you need to keep it refrigerated, so's I thought to myself I gotta keep looking. (I wonder if refrigeration might be necessary for any mizu yōkan, but other videos don't mention it so... hmm.)
The second one is from Ochikeron, which is the recipe I wrote down to make sometime.
Here's one from Just One Cookbook. Its doesn't have voiced narration, if you prefer your tutorials with writing. Also, the knife the person uses looks like it was made with the mokume gane technique (which uses several metals to make resulting item look like wood -- kinda cool, right?)
Finally, here's a spectacularly artistic one by decocookie, which also doesn't use spoken narration. It uses edible glitter and fruit rinds to make "fireworks" on top.
For recipes, I went for videos. Among the different ones that popped up on the first page of the YouTube search results, there was a mizu yōkan video that uses bamboo as the mold, making mizu yōkan tubes! (And looking kind of like pralines, but I'm pretty sure you couldn't eat the "shell" and the inside would taste nothing like the filling). I haven't looked at it, so you'll just have to go see them for yourself. ;)
Of course, if you want something super "official", there's the recipe from the website for Yamaguchi Prefecture (clicky). It calls for topping the mizu yōkan with arare mochi (aka toasted mochi), which I only heard of after finding that recipe. (Hurray for research adventures!)
Cooking Tips
Amongst the various works discovered while rushing around on the 1st to get a post put together, there is one in particular that I wish to point out. The title? Cooking Innovations: Using Hydrocolloids for Thickening, Gelling, and Emulsification. Yeah, science cooking! Other than a recipe for both mizu yōkan and anko, it had some tips (well, the anko recipe was a tip, actually...) Here are the tips it had:
First, you might be tempted to go outside the rules a bit and add your sugar first, but don't! Your kanten won't dissolve then, and you'll never get your red bean jello to set.
Another caveat (gasp!): make sure you have your mizu yōkan solidify in someplace very cool (aka the refrigerator or outside, if you're in Fukui Prefecture ;) ). If you don't you'll get anko on the bottom and kanten on the top. (That actually sounds kind of neat to me, though I don't know what would happen when you tried to serve it.)
A third tip, which I was going to mention myself, if no one else did (but probably everyone does) was this: kanten comes in more than one form. Get the powder form, because if you get, say, the stick form, you're gonna need to soak it first. I don't even know what you need to do if you get the thread form.
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| It's titled, "Well, I Thought I'd At Least Try It -- You Want It?". |
References:
Fellow dessert-ologists, I give you my sources!
"Cooking Innovations: Using Hydrocolloids for Thickening, Gelling, and Emulsification"; Amos Nussinovitch, Madoka Hirashima"; 2014
"Shunju: New Japanese Cuisine"; 2006
"1000 + Indigenous Tasty Cuisine of Twenty-three Asian Countries with Food for Thought (Purchase this Book and Help Feed Hungry Children!)"; Dr. Lawrence Wheeler, Dr Beatrice Batnag Donofrio; 2009
"和英日本の文化・観光・歴史辞典 A Japanese English Dictionary of Culture, Tourism and History of Japan"; 山口百々男, Steven Bates; 2010
"Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Japan"; Eric Rath; 2010
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| All gone! |
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