10 recipes. Page 1 of 1
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Only two-thirds of the cooked red beans are pushed through a sieve; the rest stay whole, so there are beans to bite into in the thick porridge. The glutinous rice balls (saealsim) need a little more time after they float to cook through to the center.
Three grain flours, takakibi sorghum, glutinous foxtail millet, and inakibi millet, are mixed into separate doughs, and every dumpling gets a fingertip pressed into its center for a navel-like hollow. They cook in sweet azuki soup until they float, which is where the other name, ukiuki dango, comes from. In northern Iwate they were offered to deities and served to guests after the harvest.
Sweetened azuki beans and red-and-white rice dumplings sit in a lightly salted clear broth, putting sweet and savory in the same bowl. Itokoni from Yamaguchi Prefecture changes from area to area in its broth and ingredients, and this recipe follows the clear-soup style of Hagi. Setting dumplings tinted red beside white ones comes from the colors used at celebrations.
Wide, hand-cut wheat noodles simmer briefly in a warm, sweet red bean soup, making a dessert that eats like a bowl of noodles. Coarse zarame sugar gives the beans a clean, pronounced sweetness, with a pinch of salt to round it out. Floating is not proof the noodles are done; the thickest strand gets split open to look for raw flour.
Glutinous rice, sticky millet, and azuki beans are boiled together, then worked with a wooden paddle while still hot until some grains break and the mass holds together without any sugar. On Taketomi Island in Okinawa, these cakes were prepared ahead for the Tanedori festival. Each round is wrapped in a bashō leaf, a relative of the banana leaf, and steamed, which perfumes the cake. Expect a grainy bite, with whole beans and millet still visible.
This Ishikawa miso soup comes from the Buddhist temple tradition and uses no meat or fish stock: kombu dashi is mixed with the water the adzuki beans cooked in. The first boiling water is thrown out for its astringency, and only the second goes into the soup.
Thick red bean broth, salted first and only lightly sweetened, turns knife-cut wheat noodles into a filling winter meal rather than a dessert. The beans are boiled twice, with the first water thrown out entirely, which strips their astringent edge and gives the broth a cleaner color. Glutinous rice flour thickens the strained puree just enough to hold the noodles without turning stodgy, and the pot needs frequent stirring because the bottom scorches easily. Cooking the noodles in a separate pot and rinsing them keeps their starch from thinning or clouding the broth. Chestnuts and pine nuts on top add a firmer bite against the smooth puree.
Tied to the winter solstice custom of warding off bad luck, this seasonal rice is soaked and cooked in the water the adzuki beans boiled in, which tints every grain an even red. The beans' first boiling water is thrown out, and they come out of the second pot just before their skins split.
Pushing only half of the cooked adzuki beans through a sieve and leaving the rest whole makes the porridge velvety while keeping whole beans and soft glutinous rice balls (saealsim) to bite into. Koreans traditionally eat it on the winter solstice (dongji).
Roasting the soaked rice in oil and cooling it before cooking it in sweet azuki broth keeps the grains loose and fragrant, unlike sticky sekihan, which it otherwise resembles. On the Boso Peninsula in Chiba it was offered at the Obon welcoming and farewell fires, at harvest prayers, and at celebrations after rice planting.