Hana Yori Dango
July 13th, 2008 | by Loretta |If you haven’t heard, when my foreign language skills are not in use, my memory seems to give priority to food-related vocabulary and phrases.
Yesterday, Mom and I made a stop at Sunrise Mart. After browsing at their excellent selection of Japanese groceries and snacks, I ultimately decided to get dango! Hooray. I didn’t pay much attention to the kanji until I got home.
Dango are little chewy balls– sometimes referred to as dumplings — made of glutinous rice flour. The ones I got were covered with a generous layer of black sesame paste.
Curiously enough, the ingredients label indicates that nonglutinous rice was used. I wonder if this makes it gluten-free? It seems to make sense, but at the same time they’re still chewy, so I’m uncertain.
I suspect the corn syrup is used to help retain the soft texture of these dango. From experience, glutinous rice hardens up when refrigerated. Like when we make nian gao for Chinese New Year? It’s a solid mass, despite it having a good amount of sugar in the mix. Hard to say. Mochi is very mysterious in terms of storage and ingredients used for enhancing texture. Hmm.
Overall, the flavor was pretty good, but it didn’t feel like the perfect combination. Somehow the flavors felt rather neutral when eaten together. Maybe it wasn’t a good ratio of dango to black sesame paste. I’m really not sure. Maybe I expected it to be like the glutinous rice dumplings that are eaten with syrup, hot, with a oozy filling of sesame paste inside. Not sure. But it’s a good snack and skewered food is always fun as well as convenient to eat.
Hana yori dango is something that, somehow, remains my memory during out Adventures in Japanese days. It means “dumplings over flowers,” in that things of substance are better than things that are there for superficial reasons. That’s one way of interpreting things I guess. A very applicable statement to keep in mind at the moment, because I’m trying– very hard– to be a minimalist for the move into my dorm. Currently the little white board on my fridge that once held important Commencement/Graduation information (with a generous helping of randon doodles of cats, a tofu block and a penguin, etc) has been replaced by short lists organized by category of what I’ll need for my dorm/apartment. The goal is to have no more than 100 items. :O I somehow don’t think this will be possible, because my kitchen supplies alone make up about 10-20% of the list… :\