Just Hungry

A bowl of tsubuan with some azuki beans.

Wherever I go, wherever I live, my belly remains firmly Japanese.

I love all kinds of food and will try almost anything at least once. But after I've been eating other kinds of food for a while, no matter how good it is, my belly sends a message up to my brain saying something like "Hello? Haven't we been away from home too long?" The rest of my body hasn't been back to Japan in some time, but my belly insists on being fed food from home on a regular basis. So when I feed it plain white Japanese rice and other food it grew up eating, it seems to breathe a sigh of relief and relax back down. And if I refuse to listen to its demands, it gets very cranky.

A lot of Japanese sweets are based on beans that are cooked with a ton of sugar to a paste-like consistency. Red azuki, or adzuki, beans are the most popular, and sweet azuki beans have their own name, an (餡).

There are many kinds of an, but the two most commonly used types in home cooking are koshi-an, and tsubu-an or ogura-an. Koshian is an that's been passed through a sieve so that you just have the smooth bean paste. Tsub-an or ogura-an is more rustic - it's just the whole beans, hulls and all, cooked until they are falling apart. My late oba-chan (grandmother) used to make ohagi and botamochi which are basically the same thing, just that botamochi are eaten in spring and ohagi in the fall. Either way, it was a small dumpling of home made tsubu-an and a sticky mixture of short-grain and regular rice. Some she left plain, some she dusted with kinako, toasted soy bean powder. I hated commercial an as a child since it was usually sickly sweet, but I loved oba-chan's ohagi which tsubuan that was not too sweet and even slightly salty.

The other day I got a sudden urge for tsubuan, and I had to call up my mother to get the recipe. It's very easy though takes some time. You can do the soaking part overnight of course.

This not-too-sweet tsubu-an is a good filling for steamed buns; these are called an-man. (I still don't like anman myself for some reason though.) It's also used for dorayaki, which is basically just two small American-style pancakes sandwiched together with a dollop of tsubu-an in the middle. Other Japanese foods that use tsubu-an include anpan (a sweetish bun) and taiyaki (a fish-shaped waffle with an in the middle) My favorite way to eat it though is just as-is, at room temperature. I even add a bit more salt to it, because I love that sweet-salty combination of tastes.

(Incidentally, the Wikipedia page on red bean paste says that tsubu-an is whole, uncrushed azuki beans and the partially crushed kind I'm describing here is tsubushi-an. I just know that my family and anyone around me always called the crushed kind tsubu-an.)

Tsubu-an (or Tsubushi-an, depending on where you grew up)

• 2 cups washed azuki beans
• 3/4 to 1 cup sugar
• 1/2 tsp sea salt

Soak the beans in cold water to cover for 24 hours.

Drain the beans and put them in a pot with water to cover. Bring the water to a boil, boil for a minute then drain the beans. Put the beans back in the pot with fresh cold water, bring to a boil and drain again. This twice-boiling gives the beans a better flavor, according to my mother.

Put the beans, sugar, salt in a pot, and add enough water so that it comes up to about 2cm/1 inch above the beans. Bring to a boil, then lower the heat to a low simmer. Add water if it boils away. Cook until the beans are completely cooked and falling apart. Taste, and add a bit more salt if needed.

Roughly mash the beans with a potato masher, fork or a pestle and let cool.

This will keep in the refrigerator, well covered, for up to three days or so. It doesn't freeze well - the texture turns rather grainy.

Notes:

• See my article about Japanese red rice and beans for more about azuki beans.
• I hate the word "adzuki". It sounds like some made-up word, probably coined by an non-Japanese speaker, and is phonetically incorrect. Let's stick with "azuki"!
• I recently found some small red beans at my local Indian grocery store that look a lot like azuki, though they are just marked as "red beans". I'll have to try them out to see if they are the same. I hope so because they are about 1/5th the price of the azuki beans at our local Japanese grocery!
• For people who emailed me wondering about more Japanese recipes...don't worry, they will be here. My belly dictates it.