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Do not make in advance
This recipe took around 1.5 hours to make on 2024-05-24. That is fast enough to make in the morning, assuming you don’t mess it up.
If you make it in advance, even if it doesn’t split, it will pool liquid underneath. Sad.
Deprecated
The recipe over at Kuzu-manju is probably better.
Recipe
Modified from the sweets lady book recipe on Kagari-bi by doing lots of sweets trials:
- 35g whole foods eden kuzu
- 50g granulated sugar
- 150g room temp water
Steps
- Add all ingredients at one time. Stir until kudzu is well mixed.
- Pour into a (cold) saucepan through a sieve, and break up any remaining chunks with a spoon.
- Heat on medium, stirring gently and scraping the bottom. Chunks will begin to form after a couple minutes — keep temperature until the entire mixture becomes uniform and goopy.
- At this point, the mixture will still be milky and runny.
- Begin stirring hard once the mixture is uniform! Depending on how firm you want your kudzu (firmer == glassier, but also cools much quicker and harder to work with), keep on medium heat for a little longer until the mixture starts to become translucent.
- Then, turn down to low heat and keep stirring hard!! You just want it to get a bit more elastic.
- It should be notably different from when it was white.
- Then, take off the heat completely.
- Separately, prepare plastic wrap (not cling wrap, that sticks) in sheets.
- Place a 20g scoop (ish) of kudzu onto the plastic wrap, and flatten it.
- It will be very difficult to flatten it nicely around the anko, so better to get most of your flattening done while it’s on the wrap.
- NOTE: The longer your kudzu is off the heat, the stiffer it gets and the harder it is to use. You can throw it back on the stove briefly to loosen it up again.
- NOTE: At this point it should be partially transparent. If it’s fully white, it will not magically go transparent in the steamer.
- On forming do not just pull up on the wrap, ie do not just take the corners up and tie it off. If you do this, the kudzu will get stuck in the folds of the wrap and it will not come out well. Instead, use the wrap (instead of your hands) to push the kudzu up.
- Once your anko is completely wrapped in kudzu, then you can pull the corners of the wrap together and tie it off with a rubber band.
- Place them in standard comfortably cool tap water for ~5 min. They should be almost completely stiff once you take them out, and they should come out easily from the wrap (with a little bit of stick).
- They should NOT lose their form at this point.
- Place them naked onto a steamer lined with parchment paper (one or two layers, doesn’t really matter, also steamer holes being exposed or not doesn’t really matter).
- Steam on high heat for 5m.
- On finish, take them out and spritz with water to help cool / prevent cracking. Leave to cool at room temperature.
- NOTE: NEVER PUT THEM IN THE FRIDGE. They will get foggy. When you are ready to serve them, place them on a metal tray, then place the metal tray on an ice bath for ~5m. This will chill it without fogging.
2024-05-24
Worked well. Don’t make in advance.
- To flatten out the kuzu on the saran wrap, very slightly wet part of the saran wrap, then fold the saran wrap over onto the kuzu and press that (versus pressing your hands).
- The color of the kuzu will strengthen as it cooks, not weaken. Make it lighter than you think you need.
- Don’t overcook the kuzu. Cook until it’s becoming translucent, not until it is translucent.