Japanese Sweets

19-05-23 00 / episode: 123

Script

"Japanese sweets.

Now, this is a big, big topic and I can't talk enough about it.

On the other hand, as I said before, I'm not a specialist, so I don't know a lot in detail about these things.

But Japanese sweets are wonderful.

They're strange from a western standpoint, most people think of sweets as being sweet.

But Japanese sweets involve other flavors too.

They often have seaweed in them, which has a very peculiar flavor, which I wouldn't call sweet.

They also have salty flavors in them.

One that you could have is a and a is it can be salty or sweet, but it's basically made from kind of rice.

Then there's Fuku.

Now da Fuku is usually sweet, but it's sort of a pounded rice skin wrapped around some kind of fruit.

It could be um a strawberry or a grape.

I'm sure there's other kinds of Dai Fuku that I don't know about.

One of the nice things about the Dafu is they let it sit for a while and get partially fermented just a little bit.

So it adds a new sort of sory type of flavor or, or tart flavor to the to the sweets and then there's Doray Yaki, which is really peculiar.

It doesn't seem Japanese at all.

And yet it is purely Japanese.

It's, it's just two pancakes wrapped around sweet bean, uh, sort of sauce.

Not really sauce.

It's too thick to be a sauce.

The bean part is very Japanese but the pancake part seems like kind of a Canadian breakfast.

To me, you eat them like sandwiches and they're definitely sweet.

Then there's Manju, a bean paste.

Manjoo is a sweet bean paste and they use it in all sorts of Japanese sweets.

I was surprised to hear that.

I'm eating bean paste but it's quite yummy.

And then there's the traditional mochi which is a pounded rice and that can be salty or sweet.

You can put soy sauce on it or you can put sweeter things on it.

There's so many kinds of Japanese sweets out there.

I've barely scratched the surface.

What's your favorite Japanese sweet?"