Ridiculously easy and amazingly tasty come together in this takikomigohan rice cooker idea.
It’s chestnut season, which is a time of year that always puts our Japanese-language reporter Takuya Inaba in a good mood. In Japan, you can find all sorts of cafe desserts and supermarket sweets that make use of chestnuts in the fall, but Takuya is such a big fan that he also recently bought a whole pack of dried chestnuts to have at home.
The ordinary way to eat these is to soak them in water first, but Takuya, being the chestnut lover that he is, decided to try popping one into his mouth as-is…
…which was a decision he immediately regretted. Without any sort of rehydrating, they have a consistency similar to hard plastic, and it felt like trying to eat a Lego. Still, as the dried chestnut gradually softened in his mouth, Takuya could start to feel the sensation of a strong, chestnut-y sweetness, and so he figured that not only should he actually rehydrate them, he should try using them to cook something special.
So he let the chestnuts soak in water for half a day, and then…
…he tossed them into his rice cooker, along with uncooked white rice. After adding the necessary amount of water for the quantity of rice, he added a dash of salt, closed the lid, and started the cooking cycle. All he had to do after that was wait about 30 minutes, at which point he had a whole pot of chestnut rice ready to be eaten!
Cooking like this, where you add other ingredients into the rice cooker and cook them together with the rice, is called takikomigohan in Japanese. Usually it involves vegetables like carrot or burdock root or proteins such as chicken or fish, but takikomigohan with chestnuts, kuri gohan in Japanese, is a classy fall variant.
Since the dried chestnuts were already peeled, the actual amount of time Takuya had needed to invest in cooking his kurigohan was about one minute, as he didn’t haver to do anything other than wait while the chestnuts were rehydrating and the rice cooker was doing its thing. In contrast to how easy it had been to make, the results were amazing. The kurigohan looked nice, with the chestnuts all having retained their shape during cooking. It smelled great, with a sweet, nutty aroma drifting up from the rice. And most importantly, it tasted incredible, with a captivating sweetness that’s not so strong as to cross over into the realm of an out-and-out dessert, so that the kurigohan can still be enjoyed as an accompaniment to other dishes.
With one chestnut cooking success in the books, and it having come so easily, Takuya decided to get a little more creative. Putting a bit of butter in a frying pan, he sauteed some sliced onion and sausage…
…and then added a serving of chestnut rice, as well as a dash of consommé powder.
We’re not sure if the resulting dish should be called kuri gohan pilaf or kuri gohan fried rice. What we do know is that, despite being something that Takuya made up on the spot, it’s fantastic. The nuttiness of the chestnuts plays very nicely with the meat sausage and rich butter notes, making this a great recipe to keep in your repertoire for when you want to whip up something stylish that’ll wow guests to your home or friends at a potluck party with minimal effort.
Now feeling even more confident, Takuya decided to see if he could make some chestnut sweets. Once again grabbing a frying pan, this time he put in equal amounts (20 grams [0.7 ounces] each) of butter and sugar.
After cooking them on low heat until they blended together into a sweet sauce, Takuya tossed in a few chestnuts that he’d let soak for a full day and let them cook until the sauce took on a brown color.
Then he removed his caramel chestnuts from the pan and placed them on a paper towel to cool down enough for taste-testing.
The results were awesome. The rich sweetness was immensely satisfying, and while they’re not substantial enough to be a full dessert on their own, they’re an excellent sweet snack.
So in the end, Takuya went three for three with his chestnut cooking project, with the only mistake being that he probably should have bought more chestnuts so he could make even more of these recipes.
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