Sometimes art can be deceiving. Muramasa Rebirth for the Playstation Vita makes me wish I could live inside its lush gardens and eat its gorgeous food. Consuming food in the game gives your player heath benefits and the power to forge new weapons. You can cook your own food, but there are also places along the way for you to stop and eat. Many of these foods are rendered so beautifully in the game that I would take a picture just so I can go looking for a recipe later. This is one of them.
Dango, it seems, is a kind of rice flour dumpling. Some are sweet, some are savory. Some are eaten with sauce on top. Hanami dango are eaten in the spring when the cherry blossoms are out. Just look at them. It’s bite-sized, sweet, and meant to be taken with you. It’s springtime, so they’re even seasonal right now. I must make these!
As it turns out it’s tough to find a recipe for these things in English. I found a few on some food blogs and there was one in the Anime Cookbook, but they didn’t all agree on everything. Or anything. Simple things like flour to water ratio I figured would be standard but no, I would have to just try one and see how it worked out. I tried one. It didn’t work out. I added too much water, and then put in more flour, and then more flour, and more flour, until it was like little rocks in the steamer tray. Biting into them was like sinking your teeth into a high bounce rubber ball, and any flavor they imparted came across as efficiently as licking a lollipop through the plastic wrapper. So I put it off for a year or so, hoping that I would magically come up with a good recipe.
That didn’t happen, but springtime arrived again and I thought “I’ll do it right this time. Make a few little batches to iron out the kinks, and then post my gorgeous food pictures online, making everyone jealous. Vive le food pictures!”
I found a recipe that I thought was a good starting point. Problem was, there are three different colored dango in that picture. The recipes called for matcha powder for the green one, and that sounded good, but the red ones were the same flavor as the white ones, just with red food coloring. “Isn’t this for viewing cherry blossoms? Why can’t they be cherry flavored? It turns out that they can, if you’re making it up as you go. So I did. Here’s my addition to the flavor profile of my hanami dango.
Cherry Syrup
Ingredients:
12 oz. frozen cherries
¾ cup sugar
Juice from ¼ lemon
Put all the ingredients into a saucepan and stir them together. Bring to a boil. Crush the cherries with a potato masher until they get all juicy. Simmer for 10-15 minutes. Strain into a jar.
This is already going better than expected. I’m getting really excited. On to the dango. Now, you make dango with rice flour and glutinous (or sweet) rice flour. I had both. I had used both that last time I tried making this. I thought I had put both away in plastic containers in the cabinet. I started rummaging through my cabinets and I found a container labeled “Rice flour” and this unlabeled one:
Opening it I had thought “This has to be it; there’s nothing else even close.” After opening it I had a pretty good idea what it was, and that’s not rice flour. But there was nothing else. I really didn’t want to go back to the Asian grocery store. So I figured I’d try this, quickly, and if it didn’t work out I’d start over. I put all my dry ingredients into a bowl. Equal parts (by weight) of rice flour (joshinko), glutinous rice flour (shriatamako), and sugar. Then I added the prescribed amount of water:
“Okay, so yes, that was not rice flour, wheat flour, bean flour, almond flour, or any kind of flour. You know very well right now that you put 40g of baking soda in this. Throw it down the sink and start over.” That’s what my head was telling me. But you ever have one of those days where you just want to make sure? It won’t take long. Just put this on the stove and cook it down a bit until it will come together into dumplings. I thought I saw someone somewhere say to do that. Yes. This looks much more appetizing:
I was afraid to try it. Karen came home from the grocery store and I said “What do you think of this?”
Never in our twenty years together has she ever spat my cooking into the sink before. I’m glad we’re still breaking new ground after all these years. “What the hell was that?” I fessed up that I’m not sure, but I think it was baking soda. YA THINK?!?!?! We ended up finding the right stuff (kind of) in a different cabinet and I started over.
Previous ingredients listed plus a tablespoon of vanilla extract and boom:
This is something I can form into dumplings. See?
Now we’re talking. I boiled them in water and set them out to cool, taking great care to make sure they were cooked all the way through. I even made the ones with matcha and cherry syrup. Two things to note: They were still incredibly chewy and all of them, the vanilla, cherry, and matcha flavored dango had a similar underlying flavor that was almost overpowering them. I assumed it was the rice flour and that I’d get used to it. To try to combat the chewiness I decided to actually follow the directions that everyone was telling me and, once the dough is mixed, knead it together for about a minute. I did this and guess what, the results weren’t chewy at all. However, they almost disintegrated in the pot.
See those red ones that look like they’re about to fall apart? Those are the ones I kneaded before boiling. And they still had that unfamiliar base flavor. Over dinner we were discussing my failures of the day and I finally came to the realization that hey, maybe I just don’t like rice flour. Karen nodded her agreement. It was a valiant effort, an effort Karen had been wondering why I was putting in, like a man having a bad day at the racetrack, increasingly desperate, throwing good money after bad.
So there you have it. My newest original recipe. Make the syrup. Put it on some ice cream.