Will Miss #442 - kintsuba

You can see by the illustration that my description of isn't inaccurate.

Imagine that you are walking down the street and you see miscellaneous blobs of food in different colors and someone offers you a sample and says, "here, eat this." The blob is brownish with things in it and coated in a milky white stuff and you ask what it is and they say, "just try it". Would you gleefully just stuff it in your mouth with zero information about what it is? When I first came to Japan, there was no internet to speak of. All of my food information came from a slim guidebook I'd brought with me which was designed to help me navigate supermarkets, not understand traditional cuisine. At that time, the whole culture presented me with a series of mystery foods that I could overlook or simply cram into my maw with hopes that it wasn't going to be disgusting.

It took me a long time to warm up to Japanese food because, up until I started snack blogging, I pretty much tuned it out based on early ignorance and habits. However, after I started paying attention, I found a wealth of goodies to enjoy and one of those is kintsuba, a block of jellied sweetened beans coated in a paste made from glutinous rice flour. You can buy it pre-made in shops, but it's really extraordinary when you can eat warm, freshly made kintsuba.

I'll miss the sweet, textural delights of kintsuba.

Will Miss #427 - warabi mochi

Many people write about the stages that foreigners go through when they come to Japan. Generally, they capture the flavor of what people go through, but are overly simplified and a generalization. Still, generalizations do have their place in helping provide a framework from which we can understand a situation better. For me, the food in Japan has followed a very odd pattern of approach. At first, I was wary and squeamish and never had the sort of open-minded notions that many newbies have. I stayed away from anything that looked "too Japanese". It's only really since starting my snack blog that I've become increasingly open to sampling everything in my wake. Part of the draw of blogging for me is that it does help me expand my horizons, and since my focus on food has been relatively narrow for so many years, I'm grateful that I started that blog.

"That Japanese stuff" which I avoided would include things like warabi mochi. It appears to be little gooey blobs packed in dirty with a packet of soy sauce. What it really is relatively tasteless chewy jelly-like bits of gelatin made from bracken starch that can range from bland to highly sweet. If you think that sounds unappetizing, remember that Western-made gelatin is made from bones and hooves and Japanese agar-agar gelatin is made from seaweed. Bracken starch doesn't sound so bad, then, does it? The gelatin is coated in kinako (toasted soybean powder) and offered with a packet of black (brown) sugar syrup. It's a texture and flavor treat with good depth of flavor from the various components.

I came by eating warabi mochi late in the game, but now I'm such a fan that I actually crave it from time to time. I'll miss having easy access to copious amounts of the fresh stuff.

Will Miss #338 - Good Morning Bakery

There's a chain of bakeries called "Good Morning" and one branch is in my neighborhood. They also sell their baked goods on consignment at supermarkets (such as Ito Yokado) so you can get their offerings even if a cafe or bakery is not in your immediate area. While there are tons of excellent bakeries in Tokyo, this place has a koshian (red bean paste) bread which is sublime. It's soft, lightly sweet and incredibly delicious. It looks like marble cake, but it has texture and subtle flavor delights that might convert even the most red-bean-hating person to the appeal of this traditional substance. Good Morning also has a fantastic maple pastry for the most conservative of foreign eaters and is one of the very few bakeries to sell authentic and well-made sourdough bread.

The aforementioned koshian bread. So good, even if you aren't a red bean fan.

I'll miss Good Morning Bakery, and the delights it offers me on a regular basis.