Giotto's Monts Blanc

A sure sign that fall is here is the proliferation of Mont Blanc cakes in the pastry shops. Although the chestnut-flavored Mont Blanc is, like the strawberry cake, a perennial feature on any self-respecting Japanese cake display, chestnuts are as emblematic of autumn as strawberries are of spring, and the emphasis changes with the season. Some patisseries will add a special, limited-edition Mont Blanc to the lineup, alongside the one they sell all year around, and there are often a few shiny peeled chestnuts, with the spiny husks alongside, resting on the counter above the cakes for additional appeal. A popular way to shake things up is to substitute sweet potato cream for chestnut in the spaghetti-like swirl that is the classic Mont Blanc's distinguishing feature, and you'll find purple-skinned sweet potatoes, or artistic depictions of them at least, adorning those pastry counters.
Giotto is one of the fancy patisseries in the basement of Mitsukoshi that likes to have it both ways. The Mont Blanc they sell all year round is a sleek variation on the normal chestnut-cream nest, a rocketship-shaped tower of straightened piping, with a cookie jauntily sticking out the side. On the inside, the usual white cake with rum-flavored whipped cream is set atop a circle of vanilla-bean-specked custard pudding, and there's a layer of candied chestnuts between cake and cream. The outer piping of buttercream is made from two different varieties of French chestnuts, and is almost as tasty as peanut butter.

Giotto's fancy seasonal variation is the Gin-yose Mont Blanc, which employes not only chestnuts and sweet potatoes but chocolate as well. In the attempt to please every possible taste, it loses the cohesion that any pastry needs to succeed, but I must admit that each disparate element is delicious on its own. The triangles of chocolate and plain pastry are buttery and crisp, the gold-flecked candied chestnuts are moist and rich, the sweet potato cream is earthy, the whipped cream is smooth. The most memorable part of this cake, however, was the chocolate royaltine cookies sandwiching the cream at its base. Not your average butter-and-flour cookie, these are made of tiny specks of caramelized hazelnut wafers baked in a paper thin circle, then dipped in a thin coating of milk chocolate. I have never had anything like it - impossibly crisp, despite the cream, exploding with texture and nutty flavor, the royaltine is a discovery worth all the other elements of this unusual take on the Mont Blanc.

Giotto

Nihonbashi Mitsukoshi

Basement 1st Floor

03-3231-6289

and other locations in Japan

Mentaiko Potato Sandwich

I would imagine that the potato salad sandwich is one of those "only in Japan" ideas - like corn kernels on pizza (or potatoes on pizza for that matter) it's one of those carb-overload creations that boggle the American mind. However happy Americans may be to serve their kids pizza with fries in the lunchroom or to feast on unlimited breadsticks with our pasta at Olive Garden, I think the idea that every meal should include protein has been so deeply drilled into us that an all-carb sandwich just seems deeply weird. Of course, this particular sandwich does contain protein, in the form of spicy fish eggs (mentaiko) blended with the mayo. It even includes a few grated carrots and a sprinkling of parsley. Now that I think of it, it strikes me as a somewhat Slavic concoction, if only it were on black bread instead of a chewy white roll (apologies for the missing bite in the picture above). Much as I like mentaiko in onigiri, and even on spaghetti or on a crisp baguette, I can't say I'm a huge fan of the mentaiko potato salad sandwich. Maybe I'm more American than I like to admit.

Taters

Though it's still as hot as ever outside, the rustic beauty of root vegetables makes me yearn for cold weather. Meanwhile I've spread out this bountiful harvest, all from my most recent box from Kawakami Farm, on the floor next to my kitchen, so I can admire their elegant shapes and autumnal colors in the chill of the air conditioner. There are egg-sized white potatoes at left, purple sweet potatoes at right, and in the middle are the taro known as sato imo here in Japan. Though somewhat frightening to look at, irregular shapes covered with hairy skin, once cooked they're soft and mildly sweet, and very pleasant to eat.

The process of preparing sato imo doesn't take long, but they undergo a startling transformation. The fibrous outer layer is easily pulled away by hand, leaving the scaly inner skin shown in the photo above. This has to be removed with a knife or peeler (or if you want to boil the taro whole with the skin on, I've found it slips off easily once cooked). Peeled, the taro becomes innocuously white, and looks much like a radish. It's crisper than a regular potato when raw, just as it's softer than a regular potato when cooked.

I decided to make a dish using all three types of tuber together, cutting them into similar sizes and boiling them in a little bit of salted water for about 15 minutes, adding some already cooked borlotti beans and a chopped yellow bell pepper halfway through that time, and letting them simmer until the water had cooked away and they were a little brown on the bottom. (Thanks to my nonstick pot, there's no need to add oil to prevent sticking.) I let them sit covered with the heat off for another 10 minutes, which I often do to help them release from the pot more easily. It made such a colorful dish, and I enjoyed having the different flavors and textures of each type of potato all on one plate.

Grom

Like so many other European sweets and pastries, gelato enjoys high-status as a flourishing trend in Tokyo. Just this summer, the food basement at Tokyo Midtown has seen one of its old tenants, the patisserie A. LeCompte, replaced by a gelateria (even though there's an ice cream parlor right across the hallway), and most other department stores have at least one gelato shop, too. I guess it's the brand-name imports that attract the most attention, though, because I've never seen a gelato place in Tokyo as crowded as the Shinjuku Grom was last Sunday.
Grom is an chain in Italy, but even though they probably have dozens of stores there and various other parts of the world, they pride themselves on the philosophy of using artisanal methods and only the finest ingredients. I had a pure dark chocolate and a straciatella (like chocolate chip) when I went to the shop in Florence a year and a half ago, and though I remember being happy with it, it doesn't stand out in my mind the way the Vestri or the Vivoli gelato does (I was on a mission to eat as much gelato as possible when I went to Florence, and I didn't do too badly). However, as it was the first gelato I ever tried in Italy, my memory may be distorted by the many, many cups of gelato I've had since. In Florence, the lines were just as long as they were in Tokyo, even though the shop is hidden away on a side street near the Duomo. The Tokyo Shinjuku shop is much more glamorous, being on the street level of a department store (not relegated to the basement or top floor the way restaurants usually are), with trees all around and crystals dangling from the ceiling. It's definitely a good place to see and be seen while waiting in line, the trendy way to beat the summer heat.
Grom

Shops in Malibu, New York, Paris, and Tokyo

and across Italy

Shinjuku Shop

3-30-13 Shinjuku

Shinjuku Marui Honkan Bldg., 1st floor

Purple Okra

Growing up in Alabama, I always thought of okra as the quintessentially Southern vegetable. It showed up slimy in gumbo and crunchy in a cornmeal crust on the cafeteria line, and (all too often, I thought as a kid) my mom would sautee it with a little sugar and salt in her biggest cast-iron skillet, until the edges were black and all the slime was gone. Though I didn't have many picky moments growing up, okra was something I would never willingly have chosen to eat until fairly recently. I started cooking the pods whole, just boiling them in plain salt water for about 5 minutes until they're tender, and I really like them this way, just crunched up whole like a green bean or miniature corn cob. Unlike my mother, I would much rather eat slimy food than deal with cleaning a slimy cutting board, and my method of cooking okra completely eliminates mess of any kind.
I've been eating okra quite frequently as a result of discovering this simple method of preparation, so when I saw the box of purple okra at my vegetable man's stand last week, I couldn't resist, even though I already had a bag of normal green okra from Kawakami Farm in my refrigerator. I'd never seen purple okra before, and I was a bit disappointed when the vegetable man told me they would turn green when cooked. As a test (and to save time) I decided to cook all my okra, green and purple, together. Sure enough, the purple hue began to fade within a few minutes of being thrown into the boiling water, but as the photo shows, it never did turn quite as green as the regular kind - instead it took on a sort of khaki shade. As for flavor, the Kawakami Farm okra was the winner, much more tender and juicy. But I'm not sure that color had anything to do with that.

Raisin Wich

Some of my favorite Japanese pastries are Western-style sweets, ingeniously reinterpreted. Maybe it takes a certain distance from the original to come up with a fabulous derivative -working in the opposite direction, we Americans invented the California roll, and the world learned that avocado is marvelous in sushi rolls. So I guess it should be no surprise that a Japanese pastry shop can achieve a triumph with rum raisins sunk in cream between two sable cookies. It's like rum raisin ice cream (without the ice), an ice cream sandwich (only vanilla), and a French millefeuille (with raisins) all rolled into one.
Kamakura Ogawaken, which makes these treats (and may have invented them, though I'm not sure about that), has three shops around Kamakura, but the stylish rectangular boxes make their way into my Tokyo neighborhood supermarket from time to time. Once you slit the gold seal and open the box, there are ten little raisin-wiches, each in its own plastic wrapper (of course!), lined up inside. The leaflet nestled beside them boasts that the raisins are from California, the rum is Jamaican, and the eggs, butter, and flour are all natural. They're not sold refrigerated, which makes me wonder just how all-natural that cream filling is, but the leaflet does advise chilling for the best flavor. The cookies are tender and crumbly, not crisp, and the raisins are soft and sharp with their alcoholic marinade. There are a few fragments of oilskin-thin almonds on top, but these don't taste like much. It's the combination of rummy raisins, smooth cream, and rich cookie that make these such a delightful and decadent invention.
Kamakura Ogawaken

shops in Kanagawa Prefecture

tel 0120-157-041

mail info@ogawaken.jp

Hojicha Kakikori Anmitsu at Kyo Hayashiya

Though it's still blazing hot every day, the sun is setting earlier and earlier, and now that it's September it won't be long before summer is really and finally over. I couldn't let a whole summer go by without having kakikori at least once, so on Sunday I headed over to Kyo Hayashiya in the Tokyo Midtown food basement to make a lunch out of what has to be the most gigantic and decadent pile of shaved ice in town.
Unlike the crunchy snow cones I used to get at the zoo when I was a kid, most kakikori here in Japan consist of ice so finely shaved that it melts instantly to nothing and has the same texture in the mouth as whipped cream. They're doused with a flavored syrup, which causes the outer layer to liquify dangerously. Here at Kyo Hayashiya, the only choices are different varieties of green tea or condensed milk, and I got hojicha, a type of green tea. But unlike your average bowl of shaved ice, this one comes with a ball of ice cream on top, and buried beneath the glacier there's a bowl of anmitsu - that's what's really exciting about this kakikori confection, besides its sheer height (it comes with an extra bowl, into which you can attempt to tip the upper half and thus avoid spilling it onto the tray - good luck!). Anmitsu is a traditional Japanese dessert consisting of cubes of agar jelly, red bean paste, and various other elements - here, the chewy little white balls made of rice flour, called shirotama, and the flabby green squares of warabimochi shown below. Somehow these Japanese flavors go perfectly with shaved ice, and it's nice to have something to sink your teeth into after consuming a mountain of melt-in-your-mouth ice. Though by the time I made it to bottom of the bowl, my tongue was so numb that I had to be really careful about chewing.

Kyo Hayashiya

Tokyo Midtown Shop

Akasaka 9-7-3

Minato-ku, Tokyo

03-5413-0396