Trip to Nagasaki (5) - Traditional vegan sweets

Nagasaki is in the island Kyushu where the climate is warm. In Kyushu, they cultivate some fruits, especially citrus fruits, that are rare in Hamamatsu. Near Oura Church in Nagasaki, there was a shop that sold zabon juice, fresh zabon, etc. Zabon is a big citrus fruit whose diameter can be more than 20 cm. My mother and I drank a cup of juice from a blender. It was cold but refreshing. Several years ago, I ate fresh zabon. It tasted like a grape fruit, but the texture was a little firmer.

My mother bought a pack of crystallized zabon peel as a souvenir for her friend. It looked like this. I learned later that this is a traditional sweet in Nagasaki.

Since I didn’t want to take much sugar, I bought other thing for myself. In Lantern Festival, I ate a pack of kankoromochi. It is a traditional sweet of Goto Islands made of sweet potatoes, glutinous rice, and sugar.

As kankoromochi is a kind of mixture of a steamed sweet potatoes and rice cakes, it had a unique elastic texture though the taste was that of sweet potatoes. I liked it, so I was glad to find some kinds of kankoromochi sold in a souvenir shop in JR Nagasaki Station. I bought two kinds. Both of them contain sesame and thick malt syrup in addition to common ingredients. The right one contains also mugwort.

I think I’ll eat them later, because their expiration dates are in May 2019.