Haven’t posted for a while as I have been busily trying out different variations of steamed bread. Steamed breads, or mushipan (蒸しパン), are popular snacks in Japan and you will usually find at least a few sweet or savory options at any convenience store. They are ridiculously foolproof to make and while I haven’t been able to recreate some of my favorite flavors just get (no chestnuts and no satsumaimo around here) I have come up with some new favorites.

These little steamed breads are super simple to make and just the perfect mini-batch size to make for a fresh dessert with the day’s lunch! They can be ready to steam in three simple steps.

1. Mix together the egg and sugar.

2. Mix in the other wet ingredients.

3. Mix in the flour and baking powder.

And you’re done! You don’t even have to worry about over-mixing, like you must with muffins. Then you fill yours cups (I used metal “pudding” cups from Japan) 3/4 full and place them in a large pot of boiling water. Make sure the water doesn’t reach farther than halfway up the cups or it may boil over them and make big soggy miles of mush instead of the desirable mushipan. Also make sure your heat isn’t up too high or all the water may all evaporate and you may have smoky, burnt bread! I have my stove between medium and medium-high.

Cover this pot with the lid, but wrap it in a towel to avoid it dripping any water back down on the bread–again risking sogginess. If you want to add any topping or decorations or fillings that you don’t want to sink all the way through the dough, then add them after a minute or two of steaming (which is when I actually took the picture above).

All together the breads should be steamed 10-12 minutes and you’re done! If you have time to let them cool, they will come out of their molds more easily, but if not, just run a knife around the edges. Then you’ve got a nummy treat for you (relatively?) healthy lunch!

Recipes, then! There are lots more but just four favorites to start. All of them are mixed and prepared in the order described above. That’s all there is to it!

Lemon Yogurt mushipan

1 egg

60 g of sugar

1/4 cup of plain yogurt

(if none, use vanilla, but you may wish to cut back on the sugar)

1 tsp of lemon juice

1 tbsp of oil

100 g of all-purpose flour

1 tsp of baking powder

(Lemon slices for decoration)

Afternoon tea (gogo no koucha)

1 egg

60 g of sugar

1/4 cup of strong brewed tea (I used earl grey here)

(if none, use vanilla, but you may wish to cut back on the sugar)

1 tbsp of oil

100 g of all-purpose flour

1 tsp of baking powder

A teaspoon or two of ground tea leaves

(how much you add depends on the variety of tea and how strong you wish the flavor to be)

Here I served the bread with fresh whipped cream, trying to bring to mind my favorite milk tea.

Caramel Cafe Latte

1 egg

60 g of sugar

1/4 cup of milk

2 tsp of strong brewed coffee (instant or drip)

1 tbsp of oil100 g of all-purpose flour

1 tsp of baking powder

(if you have whole coffee beans, they make a great decoration)

I added pieces of my fresh caramel in the middle to make these caramel cafe latte flavored, but even without the caramel, they are delightful. Mmm, coffee…

Strawberries and Cream

2 eggs

40 g of sugar

2 tbsp of condensed milk (if you don’t have any, a rich cream. Barring that, milk and some more sugar)

1 tbsp of oil100 g of all-purpose flour

1 tsp of baking powder

Last of all mix in 4-5 strawberries, mashed with a fork

(if you’d like, decorate the tops with a sliced strawberry as well)

Ooh, the calories. They are delicious. I think I’ll give breads a rest this week though and return to my experiments with jelly. I tried to make coffee jelly last week, but the agar didn’t dissolve well and the jelly was grainy. Blech. I’ll be trying fruit jellies and probably another coffee jelly with week for desserts!

I made “raw caramel,” the fresh caramels so popular in recent Japan, and stuffed them in cookie dough. Oh. my. god.

Full details of how to make the caramels can be found over at Just Hungry, but here’s my visual story. I couldn’t get golden syrup at my local ICA supermarket, but I really wanted to make caramel so I went with regular Swedish sirap. I couldn’t divine from the internet whether it is made from cane sugar, but it seems to have worked out all right, much to my relief.

Maki’s raw caramel (minus the golden syrup)
150 grams of syrup (from cane sugar, preferably!)
160 grams of sugar
70 grams of unsalted butter
200 grams of crème fraîche
1 tsp. sea salt

In go the sugar and syrup into a small pot.

After about thirty minutes of stirring and boredom, they get some color and have candied enough to form firm balls when dropped in cold water.

In went the butter and the crème fraîche and the hint of salt.

And after another long period of stirring and waiting (I had Yuki take over for a bit) it had become a lovely smooth pot of soft caramel.

It went into my Japanese jelly mold, which was just about the perfect size for it, and then left to harden.

Cut it up with a regular table knife, wrapped it in waxed paper and an hour or two after beginning, I had a whole jar’s worth of caramel.

Once my caramels were done and I had a great pile of them, I decided to wrap some in dough and bake them up into ooey-gooey hot-caramel-filled goodness. I always keep a stock of frozen cookie dough in the freezer for just such reasons, portioned off into mini-batches. I’d much rather have five or six fresh cookies at a time then a whole big batch risking going stale (and risking me eating them all!). My basic cookie dough goes something like this:

Basic cookie dough (makes 20 to 30, depending on how big you like your cookies!)
1 3/4 cups of all-purpose flour
1/2 cup of cake flour (if you have it, if not just go with all-purpose flour all the way)
1/2 teaspoon of baking powder
1/2 teaspoon of baking soda
3/4 cups of butter
A generous 1/2 cup of white sugar
A generous 1/2 cup of brown sugar
1 egg
1 to 2 teaspoons of vanilla (I just throw a generous splash in there, so not a very detailed measurement…)

1. Preheat the oven if you’re going to baking right away (as opposed to freezing).

2. In one bowl, measure out your flours and baking soda and baking powder, either sifting them in together or whisking them to mix evenly. Then cream together the egg and the two sugars in another bowl. Once smooth, beat in the egg and vanilla until they are well blended. Finally stir in your flour mixture and mix well. I usually give up on the spoon by midway through and just knead the mess by hand.

3a. Freeze in palm-sized balls to have an easy stock of mini-batches (five or six cookies)

OR

3b. Mix in any desired add-ins (chocolate chips, caramel, nuts, chunks of candy bars, raisins… anything really). Then shape into small balls and bake on a sheet of parchment paper, for easy cleanup, for around 12 minutes at 190 degrees (375 F).

In the caramels go…

…and out they come again, deliciously piping hot!

I sprinkled some sea salt on top before cooking them because I do love shiokyarameru or salty caramel, which makes the caramel flavor really pop. But Yuki said he “didn’t need” the salt, which is his way of saying he doesn’t particularly like something. But still, he is in love with these cookies at the moment and requests a fresh mini-batch most days. With a glass of cold milk, they are rather divine.

Things that I have learned
4) Never skip the baking powder.

This is common sense, of course, but apparently I needed a reminder. Baking powder (and baking soda and other leavening agents) add those pesky but necessary gases that help baked goods not turn into rocks. I went and bought a little can of baking powder, so hopefully this will not require a repeat performance.

Oh! And looking through my photos to upload I suddenly recall that I also made a birthday cake for Yuki last week. Which also reminds me of…

Things that I have learned
5) Even if it has been sitting a while, there’s no need to give frosting a copy more stirs.

The frosting had been lovely but after leaving it in the fridge as I assembled the cake, I thought, “Oh, I’ll just whip it around a bit and make sure it’s still good to go.” Um, no. That just caused it to start separating and go lumpy. Damn. Luckily, the Yukster didn’t say a thing about his lumpy cake.

Yuki’s strawberry cake

My ugly taiyaki (of course I gave the good-looking one to Yuki)

Well, the Yukster’s birthday is coming up and we are broke and so I am jumping on the “cheap-but-thoughtful-homemade gift” wagon. Namely, my ventures so far have been tackling the mysterious shiroi koibito (literally, “white lover”). These are a brand of cookies that are commonly brought back as souvenirs from Hokkaido and every since I first went to their factory in Sapporo in 2001, I have been a total convert. I only normally get them once every couple of years, but I never forget the taste. They are made up of small tabs of white chocolate sandwiched between two thin and delicate langue de chat or lengua de gato, depending if you’re coming from the French side or the Filipino. The cookies are crunchy, but not so crisp as to be hard or sharp in anyway. They definitely aren’t cakey, though, and that seems to be the real challenge when making proper langue de chats. I wasn’t totally satisfied with my results and they definitely aren’t up to shiroi koibito standards yet, but they are quite yummy.

Shiroi Koibito 白い恋人　(first draft)

I cobbled this first draft together after reading dozens of different variations for lengua de gatos and a couple for langue de chats. I’ll keep modifying it before I’m satisfied, so this is for a small batch — I got around 36 small cookies out of it, which I then sandwiched together.

60 g        Salted butter (should be unsalted and you should add salt separately, but for the life of me, I could not find unsalted butter at the ICA)
45 g        Confectioner’s sugar
1/8 tsp  Vanilla extract
50 g        All-purpose flour
1               Egg white (30-40 g)

Now almost every recipe I have read had different orders for mixing; some said to beat the eggs until stiff, others said to barely incorporate them, some sift the flour in last, others said eggs last…  there doesn’t seem to be too much consensus. The reason seems (to me) because different people want different things out of their cookies. Some are aiming for the delicate crisp all the way through, but others want a delicate, cakey center. Since I wanted crisp, I followed closer to Filipino versions of lengua de gato.

Make sure your ingredients have been returned to room temperature before beginning!

With a rubber spatula, mix the butter, sugar and vanilla until smooth and creamy. Try not to eat any! You’ll also want to start your oven preheating at around 200 degrees celsius.

Next sift in half the flour. Once it is well incorporated, add the egg white. A few recipes said to beat the egg whites until stiff, but most don’t say a thing about it, so I just half-arsed it and whipped them up until foamy. Next time I think I may try to actually get them stiff; I feel like they would hold up their shape better but without being too heavy.

After you have slowly mixed in the egg, sift in the remaining flour and mix until just incorporated. Ugh, just look at all that butter. Together with the heavy smell of the sugar and vanilla, I just wanted to eat spoonfuls of it. To this day, I have not outgrown my childhood belief that the cookie dough always tastes better than the actual cookies.

Next you’ll want to pipe the cookies out. Spoon all of your dough into a frosting bag (or if you’ve got an undersupplied kitchen like me, any strong plastic bag with one corner snipped off). The general guideline for lengua de gato is to pipe medium lines to around two to four inches, depending on your preferences — but I’ve seen people make them teaspoon shaped, heart shaped, write their name with them… whatever you are daring enough to try. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to duplicate the perfect squares of shiroi koibito, so I just went with the classic shape. Thought they’d look best in a decorative jar anyway.

Then pop them into the oven for something around five minutes. I saｙ “something around” because it could be four and it could be eight — but these cookies will go from “just right” to “thin flakes of ash” in about a minute. I literally squatted in front of the oven and watched them bake, taking them out just as they were starting to brown around the edges.

Move them off the cookie sheet, so that they don’t continue to cook, and then let them cool. I then started to melt my white chocolate to sandwich my lopsided little preciouses together.

Of course you should melt your chocolate in a heat bath. And you should also know — and I should have also remembered — to add some paraffin wax or similar substance if I ever wanted my chocolate to stiffen up again.

Things that I have learned:
3) Chocolate may melt easily, but it sure won’t go back.

It seems like a great metaphor for sticky relationship problems. Anyhow, the problem is that chocolate — in it’s delightful crunchy solid state — is fixed into a particular crystalline structure, on the itsy-bitsy chemical level. But as I have to always keep reminding myself, heat changes things (cf. Things that I have learned #1) and in this case it changes that nice crystalline structure into one that is not so inclined to stay stable at room temperature. Do I sound like I understand molecular physics? Well, I don’t — but the clever people at Discover do. Basically, if you want to try to return it to it’s original state, you’ll need to carefully temper it back down to it. The clever people at Discover also have an idea for seeding the crystal to help your chocolate want to return to its crunchy state, but it didn’t work for me this time, so I may just try to find some cooking wax.

At any rate, I slapped some chocolate on them, sandwiched them together, and left them out to harden. And then waited. And waited. Because, as mentioned, chocolate isn’t terribly inclined to harden again after being melted. After about 24 hours the chocolate had finally stopped being sticky to the touch, but it still definitely wasn’t hard. So there is a lot of room for improvement, but the taste is close to the cookies in my dreams of Hokkaido. Next time I may try to mix it up with a decent recipe for Pepperidge Farm-style Milano cookies, if I can find one, since they are similar in texture to what I’m going for, though a bit heavier…

…But then I was left with just one egg yolk, and I didn’t feel like anything savory, so I made a nostalgic, Japanese-style “milkshake” (ミルクセーキ or mirukuseeki)

Eggy milkshake　ミルクセーキ

1-2 egg yolks
2-3 tbsp sugar
300 ml milk

This is really too simple to even call a recipe. Simple mix your egg and sugar together until smooth, then slowly mix your milk in by thirds. If you wish to, you can strain it to make it extra smooth, but I normally don’t bother or notice any difference. And yes, I eat raw eggs here as I have in every other country I’ve lived in and still never once gotten sick from it. Buy them fresh and use them within a couple of days if you want to use them raw, otherwise just cook them up and you’re all set!

And there he has his cookies and his mini pineapple, waiting for him to arrive back home on his birthday! I didn’t have anything to decorate with, so I just printed out a nice pattern from the internet and used that. His other presents will be wrapped old-school-style in interesting newspaper, I think.

In between unpacking boxes and organizing things (did we always have so many sets of clothes?) I embarked on the great tofu making adventure. Well, the first. Because it was a failure.

Let me explain that I’m not necessarily dedicated to producing my own hand-crafted, artisan tofu. I’m lazy, as you probably realize, and if there was a decent and not-outrageously-priced tofu available in my city, you better believe I’d be on it like white on rice. Or white on tofu, as the case may be. But the only tofu at my local ICA is either A) the heat-packaged tofu in a box, which is perhaps okay to mix in something heavily flavored like mabo tofu, but definitely not for consumption on its own, in my opinion, or B) something they call tofu which came in the familiar water-filled packaging and yet had the consistency of, approximately, gouda cheese. Firm tofu can be a good thing (and I assume that this tofu is made firm to try to appeal to vegetarians and others hoping to achieve a “meaty” experience) but I have to draw the line when I could use their tofu to scrub pots.

And so now I am compelled to make my own tofu. I also like okara and yuba and all by-products of tofu making, so I figured I might as well go all out. It didn’t work, but I’m not too discouraged yet. So here’s a bit of the story.

The first step of the process — making soy milk from dried soybeans — is pretty straightforward and quite cheap. All you need is dried soybeans and water. The soybeans cost me something like 10 SEK (130 JPY/ 1.40 USD) for 400 grams and I only used half of them for this experiment, so if I had just stopped there, it would have cost me less than a dollar to make a big tub of soymilk and a big bowl of okara, the power-packed pulp that gets left over. But of course I didn’t stop there. Or even start there.

Things that I have learned:
1) Do not be lazy and attempt to use canned soybeans.

I am lazy. I am always looking for shortcuts and thinking, “Hey, how come no one ever thought of this?” It turns out that they did think of it, actually, and then they realized it was a huge mistake.

I thought I might be able to skip the overnight soaking that dried beans generally require by getting the nice squishy ones in a can. Obviously, that doesn’t work. Unfortunately, the ones in the can are nice and squishy and not rotten because they have been cooked, which as we all should have learned in Cooking 101, can do all sorts of crazy things to the chemicals that our foods are made up of. In this case, it changes the protein in the beans so that they will not become your ideal soymilk using the usual Japanese method:

Japanese style soy milk making:

Take dried beans, soak them overnight until they are soft enough to easily split. Grind them into a paste (or foam) and then boil this to force the cooked protein to separate from the milk. Strain the milk through a cheesecloth and, presto, you have a bowl full of soy milk and a cloth full of steaming-hot and protein- and fiber-rich okara in your hands.

If the protein is already cooked, it won’t separate out the way you want it to. However, you may still have some hope left in the other common method for making soy milk, which I didn’t attempt this time since I had already wasted my whole can of beans:

Alternative (American?) style soy milk making:

Take dried beans, soak them overnight, until they are soft. Then drain them, rinse them, and chuck them in a pot with water to boil for thirty minutes or so. After cooking, you add water, blend them in a food processor, add some more water, blend them some more, and finally strain this milk and then you should have a glass of soy milk and I assume something resembling okara.

This second method might have developed from an extreme form of the “island method” that Shurtleff and Aoyagi describe in The Book of Tofu, in which you partially cook the ground soybeans first, then strain them to get the milk, then cook the milk some more. In theory it may have worked to save my poor canned beans from the compost bin, but I didn’t think of it at the time, so that will be up to some other brave soul to attempt.

After I learned that canned beans wouldn’t work, I got some dried beans and began again. I left them to soak overnight and they swelled up to around twice their original size, just as they should, little darlings.In the food processor they went, along with enough water to cover them.

You flick on your food processor (if you’re lucky enough to have one — if not, you get a good workout) and almost immediately, there is a frightening transformation: what was a nice little pile of shiny beans has turned into a seething foam, more than doubled in size.

Remember that this started out as just 200 grams of dried beans, an amount that wouldn’t even fill my two hands if I cupped them together. It doubled once upon soaking, once more about processing, and it’s not done yet.

This mess all goings into a huge pot of boiling water, where it proceeds to do its level best at boiling over and destroying your entire stove. That’s why you want a huge pot. A massive pot. And even that’s not enough if you’re making a full batch; you’ll need to divide it up into separate pots.

But even as you lower the temperature to medium and fight furiously to keep it in the pot, you’ll see the foam begin to change from its thick and creamy state to something light and bubbly, as the different bits begin to sort themselves out.

Eventually it stops foaming and settles down into something which looks more like milk, and then you get ready to strain. Strain it through a cheesecloth, or if you haven’t one, then whatever bit of thin cloth you might have laying around or might have bought at a 100 yen store.

And there you have soy milk! And also okara, which is a great source of fiber and protein. You could stop right there and just enjoy your soy milk and maybe I should have, but I was after tofu. So how do you turn innocuous soy milk into a solid chunk? With one of your choice coagulants: nigari, epsom salt, gypsum, vinegar, or a citrus juice. These are the top coagulants normally given in recipes and nigari is the the preferred coagulant which Japanese tofu makers use when they are making tofu. It is basically the bittern — as you may guess, the bitter solution — that is left over after salt has been crystallized from sea water. It is mostly magnesium chloride, with a handful of other fun minerals thrown in. Next up you can use epsom salt (magnesium sulfate) or gypsum (calcium sulfate). Now try as I might, I could find no sources for nigari in Sweden, either in English, Swedish, or Japanese. I next searched for epsom and gypsum, but to no luck either. At a health food store, I finally bought what the store clerk said was the same as epsom salt: glaubersalt. Turns out it is sodium sulfate. Here began the great tofu experiment:

I attempted to make tofu with the Glauber’s salt, hoping it might indeed have the same effects as epsom salt, but mixing it into a glass of 75 degree soy milk had no effect whatsoever. It may work for the body in the same way as epsom salt, but it definitely doesn’t work for tofu in the same way.

Next I tried lemon juice and vinegar, which are both recommended by more “mainstream” and Westernized recipes for making tofu at home. The lemon juice had an immediate effect when poured into one of my cups of soy milk, but in the end produced a something like tofu but far too soft for even kinugoshi tofu and it fell apart before I could even take it out of the mold. It may have been my fault because it was not fresh lemon juice, but still a failure.

I next tried vinegar and at last! Victory was in sight! It coagulated nicely and made a firm tiny pat of something that definitely looked like tofu. It just didn’t smell like tofu. Tofu is often treated to a cold bath under running water to remove any residual bitterness from the coagulants but no matter how long I soaked my little tofu, the tang of vinegar did not completely go away.

I probably should have got some snaps of my failed attempts, but while a picture may be worth a thousand words, it sure doesn’t convey the overwhelming taste of vinegar.

Things that I have learned:
2) Hang the substitutes. Just get the bloody nigari, for goodness sake!

I could keep trying to find a better balance with the vinegar, but I’m thinking that 1200 years of Japanese craftsmanship can’t be wrong and so I’m going to have to give in and order some nigari from abroad. Once I get my hands on some, I’ll update with my further misadventures with soy products. Until then, I’ve been making the soy milk into smoothies each morning, with bananas and local lingonberries, and having an all soy breakfast by combining it with the okara crumble I made, thanks to La Fuji Mama. Mine is a simpler version (remember that I’m lazy!) and so I just toss it together with a bit of vegetable oil, a healthy swig of maple syrup, and a handful of cinnamon and fresh lingonberries before baking. It is amazing.

So overall, I’m not too disappointed with my failure. I still want some real tofu, but at least I got delicious breakfast for a week out of my attempt. If you wish to make your own attempt, and have detailed instructions, then I would recommend Maki’s guide to Milking the Soy Bean.