ホモテナシ

• Cover beans with water and wait for one night.
• Then cook them, adding cold water 3 times as they start to boil.
• Strain in water, put through a cloth and squeeze out water.
• Use about ⅔ of the initial, dry weight of the beans in sugar and cook with ⅓ of the bean paste. Then add another third, and then another. Cook until it's dry to the touch.

🧂 Be very careful about adding salt when adding sugar. In Western pastries that is a very good rule to add 0.5% of sugar in salt, but in Japanese sweets it's more obvious (or Japanese palates, or just KM's in particular, pick up on it more easily).

➡️ I tried peeling the beans before straining, but passing them through the Flotte Lotte and then through the Tamiz, I couldn't taste the difference.

• 500 gr dry beans, will yield about 700 gr strained cooked beans
• Adding 500 gr of sugar and cooking down until it doesn't stick will yield about 900 gr of 餡.

• For 白あん, you want to maximise whiteness rather than flavour. So use fresh water when boiling three times, and use a tiny bit of baking soda then rehydrating before cooking. Also, make sure the sugar doesn't caramelise, so use a medium heat.
• うぐいす餡 uses peas, which is very nice, because they cook in about 20' and don't need soaking. This an likes it if some 日本酒 is added. I use this in my 雪間の声!
• 黄身餡 adds some cooked, strained egg yolk. You can also make it with fresh yolk and cook that again, but KM gave me a very strong reaction because of the rawer egg taste, so maybe that's not for everyone.
• For the 花弁餅, you use 味噌餡 (to which I like to add some beure noisette).
• 桜あん: 10% of salted cherry blossoms to 白あん. Rinse them thoroughly, then separate stems. Blot dry, chop and mix. Colour あん slightly pink. I use this, for example, in my 吉野窓.
• Leafy 桜餡: 2 leaves of salted cherry blossom leaves finely chopped with 200 gr of 白あん. Add some colour as well. Aromatically much more interesting than the flowery 桜餡. Works well in そば饅頭, for example.
• 黒ごま餡: Mix in 5% of black sesame paste. It's a beautiful flavour, and I think should be much more widely used, for example in the 木枯らし or the けし餅. Could also work well in the わらび餅, especially if you use black sugar instead of regular sugar in the making.
• Half and half vermicelles and 白あん (for autumn)
• Add candied walnuts and a dash of 味噌 (quite nice with 饅頭, I think)

• This I stole from Argyi, but I changed the ratios from 10:4 (餡:chocolate) to be more moderate.
  • Temper 30 gr dark chocolate (melt 20 gr on bain-marie, then add remaining 10 gr and melt them in the residual heat)
  • Warm 100 gr of 白あん to 30°C
  • Mix!
• I like to use this in the 山みち.

• Pineapple jam from the Taiwanese pineapple cakes works well in かるかん, for example.
• The milk filling from midye baklava is also nice for 練り切り, for example!

• I got a recipe from LK and from KM in my drive.
• Also an LK recipe for 黄身餡 (with egg)