Tokyo Day 1

So my mum came to Japan the last week of september and we went around to do lots of touristy stuff hahaha

First few days were in Tokyo, I'll try and explain the trail of pictures hehe.



We spent the first half of the day looking for this shop, it's in an of Tokyo called Ochanomizu. Basically in the vicinity there are about 100 or more antique bookshops, my mum was interested in this one because of the wood block print art that they had.

Next up we went to this huge cemetery thats surrounded by heaps and heaps of family owned temples. Very different graves to Western style was the general response, hehe.






Token Christian Grave ROFL



There were a few graves that had their own yard and were fenced off. Alot of land space these people must have been important just that we will never know, kind of ironic...



A sign I found intensely humorous, basically because they called a cemetery a 'park' hahaha.

Green Tea Ice cream using Maccha powder

So yesterday night I made my ice cream...woo! ice cream! This is basically a quick walkthrough of what I did for those interested :)

So first off I thought I would whip the cream because last time it took me quite a while, this time it took me 3 minutes so I could have done it at a later point. Either way I fully whipped up 200mls of heavy cream which is basically 36-40% fat content :D



Next separate 4 yolks and add in 10 even tablespoons of brown sugar in a mixing bowl. Whisk that till it's an even colour.



Then add a little bit of 270mls of milk into the mixture, stir that through evenly then continue to slowly add more milk while stirring through, don't be afraid if not all of the sugar mixes in.



That goes on the stove on a medium heat, make sure to stir constantly until it gets thick. This is the point I took it off the stove.



From here put the pan onto iced water and cool the mixture down sufficiently, this is also the ideal time to whip up the cream.
After the cooling down process my layer of excess sugar was largely gone.



Add two tablespoons of matcha green tea powder to 6 tablespoons of hot water, don't use boiling if you do boil it let it cool down a little. I still haven't found a good way to mix in all of the powder well I don't have a proper Japanese tea whisk haha. Mine was more consistent that this though.



Once you are happy with the consistency mix the tea into the cooled mixture in a large enough mixing bowl for the batch of ice cream. Once it's consistent easy the cream in and fold it around a little, You don't have to make it smooth and consistent it's best to just do it halfway and then gradually mix it in as it cools in the freezer.



It went into the freezer at that point, ideally you stir it a little every hour for about 3-4 hours but I was lazy stirred it once after 30 minutes and went to bed. So I kinda have pockets of cream but it has the texture and taste, that's what I'm about. Last batch was more consistent though because I did the gradual mixing.

Maccha Mochi Mania

Among my latest endeavours (no blogspot it's not 'endeavors') in cooking the most interesting has been my attempts at a traditional style Japanese Dessert called Daifuku Mochi. It's something you can buy like everywhere in Japan and if you want to make it from scratch well it's really hard for one person haha. The home-made recipe uses shiratama-ko i.e. rice flour (1 cup) as the base to this water (2/3 cup) and sugar (1/4 cup) is added and mixed in a bowl. Now normally from here you just proceed to microwaving it because by itself its already tasty. But I wanted a maccha flavour on the outside, maccha is Japanese Green Tea powder, it's the highest quality of green tea, strongest taste and it's the one used in tea ceremonies. The powder if you want to buy even in Japan it's a little over 500 yen for 40 grams, not cheap but normally you use like a 16th of a teaspoon to make tea (they have a special spoon that is the right size). Anyway, for the first batch I added a teaspoon of maccha powder to the mochi giving it a real fragrant maccha smell i wanted to eat it as is. That went into microwave for 2 minutes, came out got stirred real quick just to collect it into a ball and then back into microwave. The best time to take it out for the final time is right after it starts to inflate, you don't want it too sloppy.

On a pan i sprinkled katakuri-ko which is....potato starch! Also some on my hands cos this stuff hot from the microwave is SUPER sticky and HOT, I'm really the worst person to make this stuff I have baby hands that can't take heat. But yeah from there I split the big ball into 6 smaller ones. Oh I should mention for the first time I used just premade strained red bean paste 'koshian' I bought, so I portioned this into 6 small balls and had them ready to go in the mochi on a board. So from there it was just a matter of getting the koshian into the mochi, closing it into a ball and making sure you can't see the filling inside. First one failed, but the others turned out OK :)




Yesterday, though feeling brave from my half success with that batch I tried the impossible once again, ice cream filling. Now, I had tried this before but putting together hot mochi with ice cream had awful consequences, the ice cream would melt on contact making it harder to collect inside the mochi and in turn it would freeze the mochi making it no longer sticky so it wouldn't close....DISASTER!!!!1!1!

This time I tried to circumvent that problem by pre-wrapping the ice cream in koshian, which would not go runny when in contact with mochi and I could get it into the fridge before the ice cream inside melted and started oozing out. Unfortunately this double failed, the ice cream still melted before it froze in the freezer so a little oozed out of the koshian. Then when I tried with the actual mochi...well when I was making it it worked for the most part, besides the filling being too big so a batch that was supposed to make 6 made 3 LOL! The first one failed as always, the other two though I managed to wrap and enclose the mochi and they went like emergency services speed out of the kitchen into the freezer. I waited a while for the ice cream to re-freeze then took them out and cut them up to see how they fared. First of all the bottom side that was attached to the board didn't freeze and actually a hole formed where a little filing came out but it wasn't bad, it just looked bad....yeah, that's my theory. Looking at the pictures you can also see that the ice cream still liquified and it sank to the bottom of the mochi which is lame.



So, things I have learnt from my experience and watching videos online:
-Put glad wrap over the bowl when it goes into the microwave
-Use that glad wrap as a cover for the board, and then sprinkle the katakuri-ko over that, reduces on wasteful sticking.
-For Ice cream mochi, wait a sufficient amount of time for it to cool down, I don't quite know how long yet but using mochi straight of microwave is just not working.

Also, I thought the last time the ice cream was melting because I used my own homemade one, apparently I should of had more faith in my ice cream. So for the next trial I will go with a Maccha ice cream filling and standard white mochi :)