Vegan sweets in October

As I have already introduced in this blog, autumn is the season of chestnuts and sweet potatoes. Compared with the last month, confectionary stores have more diversified sweets now. When I went to the Enshu Gourmet corner in the basement of Entetsu Department Store this evening, two popular sweets were already sold out. They were kurishigure and kurikinton (introduced in this blog last November) made from chestnuts. However, I could manage to get the last imoyokan. These three kinds of sweet are from Baigetsu (梅月), an old confectionary store in Hamamatsu. I asked the salesclerk if they are always sold out late in the evening (it was a little over 19:00). She said that many people come and buy them as now is the season.

This is imoyokan. Usually, yokan is jellied adzuki bean paste, but this one was different. It was made from sweet potato, sugar, white kidney beans, salt, and trehalose. The surface had a baked color.

It was very sweet and reminded me of dried sweet potato that I often eat in winter (imoyokan was sweeter though). I have rarely eaten this kind of yokan, but I prefer it to ordinary yokan with adzuki bean paste because its sweetness feels more natural.

In May One Ekimachi West in JR Hamamatsu Station, there is a confectionary shop Furusato where I bought sweets for moon viewing last month. This time, I found an interesting sweet called kuridango or chestnut dumplings. Like common dumplings it had sauce flavored with soy sauce.

As dumplings were yellowish, I thought that chestnuts were mixed into them. I was surprised to find that they were stuffed with white kidney bean paste with chestnuts because dumplings usually don’t contain any paste inside. It was so sweet that I could hardly feel the flavor of the sauce. The yellow color of the dumplings seemed to be that of corn flour mixed into rice flower.

Though kuridango was a rare and interesting sweet, it was too sweet for me. So I took out a leak miso rice cracker I bought in Michi-no-eki Mokkulu the other day to take away the sweetness in the mouth.

This cracker is flavored with soy sauce and soybean miso, and chopped leak is sprinkled on the surface. It had a salty flavor of miso but made me feel like eating more than one.