Xôi Lá Cẩm II

 

 

 

 

 

Xôi Lá Cẩm
Lam's Seafood $1.50

More usually bright purple from the addition of magenta plant leaves, xôi lá cẩm is a sweet-and-savory Vietnamese snack of tinted glutinous rice topped with shredded coconut, toasted sesame seeds, velvety mung bean paste, and salt.  A taco-like format makes this particular variation a little more user-friendly by encasing the extremely sticky steamed rice in an edible rice flour wafer. 

Sesame Brown Rice Wafer

Sesame Brown Rice Wafer
Mic's, $3.39/box

Something about wafer cookies is so irredeemably childish to me. Is it because they were cheap enough to be a staple snack at my kindergarten? Or because they're as colorful as construction paper and a thousand times as sugary? The little slabs of pink, yellow, or orange cracker cemented together with frosting seem like something Dorothy might have snacked on after her world turned Technicolor.

If those rainbow wafers recall the past, Mic's sesame brown rice wafers just might represent the future: delicious, but dark, in all senses of the word. The textures are familiar--crisp, foamy planks and unctuous cream--but the goth coloring and mild, toasty sweetness are unexpected. Both come from the addition of ground black sesame seeds. As a nutrient-dense crop capable of surviving in inhospitable conditions, sesame has been cultivated for thousands of years, spreading from sub-Saharan African to countries around the world (today Myanmar, India, and Mexico are big producers). Many cultures have already developed a taste for sesame (try to imagine a McDonald's bun without its sprinkles) and it seems likely that as the world's climate grows more erratic, we'll be finding more uses for this flavorful "survivor" crop.

In Seattle, you can find Mic's wafers at Rising Produce in the ID. Want to get better acquainted with this flavor of the future? Check out black sesame cereal, keo me xung, goma dango, or kyung-dan.

Keo Me Xung

Keo Me Xung
Coconut Tree Brand, $0.79

Another discovery from Seattle's pan-Asian Rising Produce grocery, keo me xung is a Vietnamese treat with no easy translation. The label suggests either "sesame cookies" as an English equivalent, or the French for "sesame confection" (confiserie aux sesames). Neither quite fits the bill.

The size and thickness of a large tortilla, keo me xung is a floppy sweet crepe made of whole toasted sesame, ground peanuts, and sugar. Tearing it into bite-sized strips reinforces a fleeting resemblance to sesame-studded gum, but the initial chewy resistance quickly disintegrates into a mouthful of barely-sweet glaze and pleasingly pebbly seeds.

Black Sesame Cereal

Black Sesame Cereal

Greenmax, $6.79/16 servings

With my demanding sweet tooth, instant desserts always seem like such a good idea. Embarrassingly often I come home from the store with boxes or sachets or envelopes full of magical powder that requires only water to transform into jelly, pudding, gruel, or some species of thick, sweet beverage for which there is no word in English.

Unfortunately, my sweet tooth is almost as discerning as it is demanding, and once I've welcomed them into my home, most of these over-sweet, artificially-flavored, and additive-laden treats languish in the cupboard until the packages are as dusty as their contents.

The one big exception to this rule is Black Sesame Cereal from Greenmax, a Taiwanese company that has been making seed- and grain-based convenience foods since the 1960s under the banner "Make Healthy & Beautiful Wish". Since Greenmax shuns colorings, artificial flavors, preservatives, and non-dairy creamer their sesame cereal looks like sun-bleached asphalt but tastes like the real, comforting, and delicious things from which it is made.

Black sesame cereal contains just eight ingredients: sesame, black beans, brown rice, Job's tears (barley), wheat germ, medlar seed, licorice root, and brown sugar. Amongst my entire collection of just-add-water treats, this is the only instance in which sugar comes anything but first on the list of ingredients.

A little hot liquid renders each packet into a creamy and respectable breakfast with 143 calories, 2.6g of protein, and 4.7g of fiber, plus 11 vitamins and minerals including calcium and iron. Mixing it with coffee instead of water intensifies the nutty, roasty flavor--and adds a little kick.

Kyung-dan

Kyung-dan
Uwajima, $3.19/15

Teeth still on edge after several disappointing purchases of grocery store sweets (eg choco coffee mochi, banh xu xe), when I spotted the Uwajimaya superstore's display of Korean cakes, I almost kept walking. Something snagged my attention though--the colors? the textures? a whiff of cinnamon escaping the plastic-styrofoam trays?--and I lingered long enough to realize that these rice cakes were fresh and tender, not the thawed blobs I was expecting.

I chose a pack of small round kyung-dan (also spelled gyung-dan), dumplings made of boiled rice flour dough (much like Japanese shiratama dango). They were filled with an impeccably smooth red bean paste and rolled in five different but equally delicious toppings: confectioner's sugar, black sesame, two kinds of bean powder, and cinnamon.

Kyung-dan are among the many Korean confections manufactured at Han Yang Oriental Food in Lakewood, Washington (yep, that Lakewood) and sold in Asian markets around the Pacific Northwest. Judging from this cooking lesson, they're also reasonably easy to make at home.

Han Yang Oriental Food Mfg
3819 94th St.
Lake Wood, WA 98400

Dango

Day twenty-one: Dango / 団子
Furuya-Koganean, 3-2-4 Hatagaya, Shibuya-ku, ¥945/box of 5

From 1936 until about 10 years ago, Furuya-Koganean operated out of a single shop, doing a respectable trade in sweet staples such as yōkan and monaka. Then one of its products was “discovered” by a Mitsukoshi depachika buyer, and, ta-da, a star was born. Like a hit TV show, Furuya spun off one company (Hideki) and then another (Koganean—of which, more later), and today boasts 20 outlets. Unlike many spinoffs, all of Furuya’s offshoots are known for maintaining the quality of the original.

But jewel in the company crown in still the product chosen by Mitsukoshi as the best of the best, their dango, seen above in a picture that doesn’t begin do them justice. That heap that looks like salt and pepper is actually crushed black sesame seeds and wasambon sugar. Something like 98% of the sesame consumed in Japan was grown in China for oil extraction; Furuya’s toasty, aromatic black sesame is grown in Japan with just this end in mind. Wasambon sugar, as previously mentioned, is a rare and delicate sugar coaxed out of tiny Chinese canes on the island of Tokushima.

Buried under that delicious detritus are three pale, chubby dango on a bamboo skewer. There are almost limitless variations, but dango are basically balls of flour-based dough that are steamed or boiled until translucent and succulent; these are made using sweet rice flour, hot water, and nothing else. Dango are a bland but adhesive core that can be doused in a range of sauces, pastes and powders, such as salty/sweet crushed goma. At first I was cursing the powdery mixture for flying up my nose but by the end I was mopping up the spillage with a damp finger.

Furuya starts production at 3 o’clock every morning, and advises that their dango must be eaten the same day. Well, if you say so…

The pictures below show the packaging for the dango 5-pack, and the premises of the original shop.