145-year-old Niigata brewery gives us some confusing but intriguing advice.
The brewery Kikusui Shuzo has been in business in Niigata Prefecture in 1881, so they know a thing or two about making sake. We figure they’ve also got a lot of people on their staff who know a thing or two about the best ways to drink sake too, so we’re inclined to take their advice on how to enjoy their products, such as their flagship premium canned sake, Kikusui Funaguchi.
▼ Kikusui Funaguchi
So ordinarily we’d have taken the company’s recent tweet, which said “You should not dip castella cake into Funaguchi,” as sage wisdom. However, the tweet also said “We tried doing this. The results were dangerous.”
Seeing as how dipping cake into sake isn’t really a thing in Japan, and thus no one would have thought to do this anyway, we began to think that Kikusui Shuzo doth protest too much about this idea, and so while we weren’t sure if we were actually following or defying their advice, we decided to try it for ourselves.
For the uninitiated, castella is a kind of sponge cake. Based on recipes brought to Japan by Portuguese traders in the 16th century, the ingredients of modern castella include mizuame, a clear molasses used in traditional Japanese confectionaries, giving castella a unique spot in the sweets pantheon as arguably both a western and a Japanese-style dessert. The flavor is sweet, but not cloyingly so, making castella something that mature adults enjoy as much as young children do, if not more.
After a quick trip to the store, we had an open can of Kikusui Funaguchi and a few slices of castella in front of us, and were ready to get this unusual taste test started. Picking up our fancy fork, we stabbed a piece of cake and dunked it directly into the can of sake.
This goes against several hundred years of established protocol for how to eat castella and drink sake, so we couldn’t help feeling a bit of mental resistance as we did it. Still, we did have Kikusui Funaguchi’s permission (we think) to do this, so we didn’t feel too bad about it…and we didn’t feel bad at all after we tasted it.
The results were delicious, so delicious that we could see why Kikusui Shuzo had felt the need to treat this as a forbidden art of gastromancy. Because of its soft, spongey consistency, the castella quickly soaks up a large amount of sake, and as you take a bite the flavor of the rice wine steadily spreads across all of your taste receptors. The gentle sweetness of the castella draws out more of the sake’s sweet notes too, but without stumbling into the sort of artificial-feeling flavors you get with a conventional sweetened cocktail.
The experience is also very different from, say, a rum cake. While cakes baked with alcohol retain a hint of their alcoholic flavor, most of it is lost in the cooking process. When dipping already-baked castella into sake, though, all of the beverage’s flavor and alcohol content is retained.
▼ Arrow indicating our sake-dipped pieces of castella
It’s a bit of a toss-up as to whether this combination will be more satisfying to those craving cake or those craving sake, but if you’re someone who like both of them, odds are you’ll find a lot to love here. Even if you can’t find Kikusui Funaguchi specifically in your neck of the woods, we have a hunch other brands of sake will also work well as long as they’re not too dry in terms of flavor profile. Types of sponge cake other than castella might also be feasible candidates, but you’ll want to avoid extra-airy cakes, since if they soak up too much sake the slices might tear off from the weight of the liquid before you can bring the fork up to your mouth. We also recommend against tossing the cake slices into your sake and leaving them to soak, since that’ll give you a soggy lump with the flavors of the cake completely covered up. Instead, you want to follow the same style as you would when dipping a piece of sushi into soy sauce, a quick dunk to add the flavor but without leaving the morsel to linger in the liquid for too long.
So thanks, Kikusui Shuzo, for letting us know about a great new way to enjoy sake, even if it took a little reverse psychology to get us to try it.
Reference: Kikusui Shuzo, Kikusui Shuzo official Twitter account
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Insert images: Kikusui Shuzo, SoraNews24
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