Daifuku Mochi

     It's hard to express the deliciousness of traditional Japanese sweets. Red bean paste inside a dumpling of gooey, chewy sticky-rice dough doesn't appeal to everyone, but those of us who love it can get pretty obsessive about them. Daifuku mochi, as the plain white-rice, red-bean variety are called (the name means sticky big luck), are sold in the preservative-packed, 100-yen incarnation in every convenience store, and big gift boxes full of sweets with an even longer shelf life are ubiquitous in stations and around other touristy spots. These are fine, but they don't have the exquisite flavor and texture of fresh.

     Asanoya is a mochi shop in Akasaka where the mochi are made fresh every morning and will start to get stiff and crusty within 24 hours. The specialty, on the far left and pictured above, is mame-daifuku. Mame (pronouned mah-meh) means bean, and there are salty-sweet candied red beans sunk in the rice dough, a pleasant textural and flavor contrast to the chunky sweet bean paste inside. Next in the lineup are sakura mochi, a pink-tinted square of thinly rolled dough rolled in a cylinder around red bean paste and topped with a pickled cherry-tree leaf. Third in line are kusa-mochi, the rice dough flavored with the herb yomogi, which turns it green and gives it a delicious grassy flavor. The red bean paste in these is the smooth kind, my favorite. Last are ohagi, which are an inside-out version of daifuku - rice inside, red bean paste outside. They're kind of hard to eat - you need a fork - so they're not my favorite even though I love red bean paste and the idea of having it in the larger proportion is a great one in theory.

     The only other thing they sell in this tiny shop is kushi-dango, unfilled rice-flour balls skewered on a wooded stick and grilled, then doused with a salty-sweet sauce of soy and brown sugar. The first time we went to the shop, these were selling out before our eyes as we waited in line at the window, and the little old grandma behind us kept darting to one side and the other, keeping an eye on the dango and becoming ever more agitated as the lady in front of us bought all but one. We only were after mame-daifuku that day, so the grandma got her dango, but the next time we made a special trip a little earlier in the day to get a stick of dango for ourselves. The shop opens early in the morning and is supposed to close at 7 pm, but I've heard they usually sell out long before that.

Asanoya

Tokyo, Minato-ku

Akasaka 2-10-4