Tonight, a good pichade. Lazy because I was too lazy to walk to the shop and get yeast for the dough. And I used a machine…
Tchak, tchak…lots of onions.
In the home-bakery (the jam program).
On dough with 1/2 whole wheat flour, it is made with baking powder.
Baked. It’s different with yeast, but this version is nice too.
The rainy season we have now in Japan (mid-June ~ mid-July in Kansai) is married with the plums. It’s called the “plum rains”. So these ume are the “rain plums”.
You make think they are not ripe on this photo. It’s true they are very sour and hard. But that’s at this stage of maturation that they are picked and used to make umeboshi (pickled plum).
When they reach this color they are too mature for the salted pickle. When they become soft…they are not sweet, still as sour and less fragrant. Well, mines are yellow and still hard.
Good to make jam !
With kurozato black sugar.
I’ve just put the whole plums, blocks of sugar and water in the home-bakery. Lazy… but I was punished : that splashed and then cleaning the machine was a hell !
On the little plate, ume pesto (see here).
The sweet bread of the season is topped with a cherry blossom !
pickled sakura
It’s seasonal variation of anpan, a kashipan (Japanese sweet bread) filled with anko sweet bean paste. :
A sweet bread dough : 1 ts of yeast, 3 tbs of kurozato black sugar, 2 cups of AP flour, enough tonyu (home-made soy milk) to wet that. I’ve mixed it in the home-bakery machine.
Filled with sakura an paste and shaped.
DIY sakura bean paste (click here)
Baked 20 minutes at 180 C. OK, the shapes are… what they are.
Only one had a perfect aspect, but they were all delicious. I didn’t make enough.
My reader Nippon-nin thought the black rice bread (bread with added rice) looked like o-seki-han, Japanese red sticky rice.
sekihan
Today this is the real Canada Dr… well, the real sekihan-pan.
The other had not the flavor of the festive rice. This one has it 100%…
It’s really made of red azuki beans and of rice. I used “rice bread flour”, a mix of milled rice with gluten so I could make a classic yeast bread dough. The product is a bit expensive and I don’t think I’ll buy it again. I think regular rice flour and baking powder could make a good version too. Both dough could be steamed in a rice-cooker instead of baked in the oven. There are many possibilities.
I made the dough with the cooking broth of the azuki beans, then added boiled beans to it.
On top of that pink rice you often add gomashio. Normally, it’s crushed sesame with salt. I’ve let them whole.
Many shapes.
Back side.
Inside. You can see the beans in a quite moist pink bread.
Enjoy with green tea. Hot or cold, it really tastes like seki-han. That could be a great bread for a hanami picnic under the cherry blossoms if…
If I still have some left when the storm stops and the flowers open.
If the storm lets a few branches on the trees.
It’s apocalyptic today. Ffffffffffffff… the wind. Good point : the wind has cleared the air from pollen so we can breath better.
Bread with black rice.
Where does this idea come from ? Daring Bakers. But not only.
Well, that’s floating in the air. Now in Japan, there is a real craze (orchestrated by marketing wizards) around the Home Bakery machines that make bread from rice. Well, that’s not really possible to make bread with only rice as it lacks gluten. There are various *tricks*, but here I simply added the rice to bread flour, inspired by Daring Baker’s brown rice bread recipe.
I was experimenting the Dutch crunch for the “tiger bread” of the challenge. I had the “plain rice flour” called by the recipe. So I tried 2 substitutes here and I didn’t get the expected tiger effect, but those funny rolls.
That’s Chinese black rice. Is it sticky rice ? Maybe. I don’t know what I buy ? Hey, no. That’s the charm of shopping in Chinatown. That’s not that they can’t speak Japanese, that’s they are friendly like jail doors. They don’t talk to you. They write minimal information on packages. Like for rice, they put in a transparent bag : you can see what it is. The label has only origin and date, as that’s compulsory. So, it seems semi-sticky. I wish I could tell you…
I cooked it normally in the rice cooker and I put one cup in the blender with 3 cups of water to get a thick sauce. I made a normal bread dough with this addition, in Kiki (my home-bakery).
Surprise : the dough went very high (3 to 4 times the initial volume) and it was VERY sticky and when I tried to take it with a spoon it made bubbles ! I think that’s the effect of the stickiness of the rice.
First experiment : Corn starch coating. It never became a paste, it leaked around.
Second experiment : Joshinko coating. Joshinko is a rice *processed flour* used to make Japanese sweets.
The bread was as you see pink inside, very soft and fluffy. Well perfect toast bread.
The corn starch coating, that looks like plaster. That tastes… not. Nothing. That’s decorative, if you like white…
Joshinko coating gave a tastier crust, but no tiger skin effect. The bun didn’t raise as much as it should.
Well interesting. I’ll make more breads with rice.
GOURMANDE in OSAKA 