matcha bean paste experiments
Jul. 4th, 2009 03:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wombat1138Having been regularly snarfing down a variety of anpan with a green tea-flavored filling, I decided to try making a small trial batch of matcha bean paste, starting with soaking 1/2 cup of small white dried lima beans in water overnight.
For actually cooking them, a slow stovetop simmer didn't work out for me; eventually dumped them into my mini-crockpot to continue a low simmer until morning. By that time, there was a hint of caramelized browning in the cooking liquid, but I don't think it had any major side effects on the beans themselves, since I fished out the beans with a small skimmer-sieve. Draining them would've also worked, but I wanted to hang onto the cooking liquid in case it might be needed. (It wasn't.)
Tried to mash the beans by hand, but that didn't work out either; I think my suribachi/surikogi set is just too small to be effective, and the bean skins kept getting in the way. The semi-mashed beans also seemed a bit watery at first, but the extra liquid dried out as the process continued. Decanted everything into a rotary food mill and ground the beans through the finest disc, which seemed to leave the bean skins behind on top.
The other ingredients for this run ended up totalling ~1/4 cup sugar and 1 teaspoon matcha powder. Given that some of the shiro-an recipes I checked out called for a ~1:1 beans/sugar ratio, I thought I was being pretty conservative by starting out with only 1/4 cup, but even that turned out plenty sweet; probably even less sugar would still work out.
Scooped about half of the resulting paste into a small plastic sushi mold to make six small stubby cylinders; the rest of it went into a storage container. All of it is currently in the fridge; dunno how much the taste is likely to change when cooled down. I think it tastes pretty similar to the anpan filling, but it loses something without the surrounding bread. I suppose I could just spread it onto plain bread, but at the moment we don't have any fresh bread and all of the supermarkets have probably closed down for July 4th already. Maybe I'll try some on toast later on.
For actually cooking them, a slow stovetop simmer didn't work out for me; eventually dumped them into my mini-crockpot to continue a low simmer until morning. By that time, there was a hint of caramelized browning in the cooking liquid, but I don't think it had any major side effects on the beans themselves, since I fished out the beans with a small skimmer-sieve. Draining them would've also worked, but I wanted to hang onto the cooking liquid in case it might be needed. (It wasn't.)
Tried to mash the beans by hand, but that didn't work out either; I think my suribachi/surikogi set is just too small to be effective, and the bean skins kept getting in the way. The semi-mashed beans also seemed a bit watery at first, but the extra liquid dried out as the process continued. Decanted everything into a rotary food mill and ground the beans through the finest disc, which seemed to leave the bean skins behind on top.
The other ingredients for this run ended up totalling ~1/4 cup sugar and 1 teaspoon matcha powder. Given that some of the shiro-an recipes I checked out called for a ~1:1 beans/sugar ratio, I thought I was being pretty conservative by starting out with only 1/4 cup, but even that turned out plenty sweet; probably even less sugar would still work out.
Scooped about half of the resulting paste into a small plastic sushi mold to make six small stubby cylinders; the rest of it went into a storage container. All of it is currently in the fridge; dunno how much the taste is likely to change when cooled down. I think it tastes pretty similar to the anpan filling, but it loses something without the surrounding bread. I suppose I could just spread it onto plain bread, but at the moment we don't have any fresh bread and all of the supermarkets have probably closed down for July 4th already. Maybe I'll try some on toast later on.