Vegan sweets in February

On February 3, I introduced natamochi in this blog. It is a vegan sweet, and I found it very good. Though it is eaten just for Setsubun or the day before the first day of spring, the shop Mataichian in Entetsu Department Store has some other winter sweets available for a longer period. One of them is a relatively new kind of sweet called ichigo daifuku. Daifuku is a rice cake stuffed with adzuki bean paste. It is a popular sweet, and ichigo daifuku is a kind of daifuku with a strawberry (ichigo) in it or put on the top. Since it is rather unusual to use fresh fruits for Japanese traditional sweets as they are, I think that this is a great invention. Mataichian has two kinds of ichigo daifuku, and I bought one of each. As I took them out from small plastic packs, I felt the sweet aroma of strawberries.

Under the strawberries, they looked like this.

The left one is stuffed with white bean paste. Generally, white bean paste has a light taste, so I ate this first. I found the bean paste very sweet. The strawberry was fresh but tasted a little bit bitter.

The right one is stuffed with semi-crushed adzuki bean paste. Though it was also sweet, it had the original flavor of adzuki beans similar to that in the rice ball I had the other day. Before I bought these ichigo daifuku, I talked with another customer who chose this kind of ichigo daifuku. She praised Mataichian’s good adzuki bean paste, saying that ichigo daifuku would surely taste good.
I’m not used to eating ichigo daifuku and the combination of bean paste and strawberries, but the two kinds of bean paste, especially adzuki bean paste, were really good.

The strawberries were local products. From January to May, you can enjoy strawberry picking in many farms in Shizuoka Prefecture, including those located near Lake Hamana in Hamamatsu. Ichigo daifuku are also sold in this period.

Mataichian has also a traditional sweet called uguisumochi. It is a famous sweet sold in many Japanese style confectionary stores in February. “Uguisu” means a Japanese bush warbler, which is also called “spring-announcing bird”, and uguisumochi takes after it. The sweet was named by Toyotomi Hideyoshi, a feudal lord and chief imperial minister in the 16th century. Uguisumochi is coated with uguisuko or flour made of roasted green soybeans.

In many cases, the surface of uguisumochi looks green. Though the coating of Mataichian’s uguisumochi wasn’t green, but the skin under it was green and stuffed with adzuki bean paste. It was softer than ichigo daifuku I ate before, and the paste was smooth. Personally, I like ichigo daifuku better, but uguisumochi also seemed to be selling well.

Mataichian (又一庵) has many delicious sweets, but its specialty is kintsuba. Maybe I’ll introduce it next month.