Today we were heading to Kyoto, one of the most famous cities in Japan. We rode the Nozomi train, the fastest way to get from Tokyo to Kyoto. I’m starting to learn more of the Shinkansen names because kids are so interested in them. I remember memorizing dinosaur names in my day, but I guess the in-vogue thing is Japan is train names.
We had a few things on our agenda when we first decided to come to Kyoto. We wanted to visit one of my husband’s favorite shrines in all of Japan (which isn’t an easy commute from Kyoto, but it’s not too bad) and there is a huge train museum that we wanted to take our son to.
We were able to get out of Tokyo a little earlier than expected and changed our train time easily at Yoyogi Station. After changing our tickets, my husband decided to relive a fun past experience. He called up a local yatsuhashi shop and booked a cooking lesson. 8 years ago, we went to the same place. I can’t even count how many times we have told people about this fun experience.
Yatsuhashi is a Kyoto treat. There are two kinds - soft and crunchy. The soft ones are a little like raw dough with a small amount of anko (sweetened red bean paste) inside. The outside is dusted with cinnamon and I would guess starch to keep them from sticking to each other. Nowadays you don’t have to get anko inside. There are a plethora of flavor options to choose from. We picked up black sesame, white sesame, and yuzu soft yatsuhashi. Crunchy yatsuhashi is a combination of rice flour, sugar, water, cinnamon, and white sesame. It is baked on a griddle and then pressed into its traditional arched form. Crunchy yatsuhashi only comes in cinnamon flavor.
The soft yatsuhashi is, I would guess, the more popular variety. Although it is a very popular gift from Kyoto, it doesn’t last long (our box expires in only 8 days). So you need to gift it or consume it quickly!
I fell in love with the crunchy yatsuhashi back when I didn’t like anko, still the most popular filling in soft Yatsuhashi. It also didn’t hurt that I love cinnamon, a rare flavor in Japan. Many people in Japan associate the flavor of cinnamon with yatsuhashi. I can’t think of another example of it being used here.
So, we took the bus from JR Kyoto Station to near the store, Izutsu Yatsuhashi Honpo. It is the only shop in Kyoto where you can make crunchy yatsuhashi! We paid for my husband and I (technically, our 5 year old was too young to participate) and headed upstairs to re-learn the process.
The beautiful classroom (that had been redone since we had last gone there 8 years ago), had 6 stations and one teacher. She helped us put on coats to protect our clothes as well as hair nets and gloves for sanitation. She then walked us through the process of laying down the precut sheets of dough and moving the wooden blocks in a particular order to cook the cookies evenly.
You start with the final row and put them onto a press, that you use metal bars to shape. Our son was able to participate in this part of the process because it wasn’t a liability like the grill was.
Then you slowly move the baking cookies over in a particular fashion. Some you simply moved, others you clapped the two pieces of wood together to get them to flip, and one set you rotated. Although it was fun, I couldn’t imagine doing it all day, everyday.
We were then taken to a table where we decorated the labels for our yatsuhashi canisters. The instructor took the yatsuhashi we made and sealed it in packages to put into our tins. She told us that we should eat them relatively quickly since they don’t have any preservatives in them like the ones sold in the store.
We all agreed that this was really interesting for us. Even though the class wasn’t in English as all, it was still super fun for me. My husband translated a couple interesting facts, like yatsuhashi was first made in the 1600s and this shop has been in business since 1805! Of course, maybe it was because I just want to eat all the yatsuhashi!
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