煉り切り
Nerikiri / Smooth Ball of Sweet Bean Paste
This is one of the main sweets in tea ceremony, which has very smooth texture to dissolve in your mouth quickly. You can make the outer paste, 煉り切り餡 (Nerikiri An), by mixing Gyuhi in the recipe of Hanabira Mochi and Shiro Koshi-An. It is fun to tool the sweet ball into various shapes as like playing with clay. (Cooking time: about 1 and a half hours)
Ingredients (for 12 eaches)
| Sruffing |
餡
An / Sweet Vegetable Paste | 300 g |
| 煉り切り餡 (Nerikiri An) |
白濃し餡
Shiro Koshi-An /White sweet bean paste | 300 g |
求肥
Gyuhi /Soft Rice Cake | 30 - 40 g |
| Colorant | a particle |
Directions
- Divide An paste for stuffing into 12 balls.
Put Shiro Koshi-An paste into a glass/ceramics bowl and cover the paste with a paper towel. Heat in microwave oven for about 2 minutes. Uncover and mix the inside well. Repeat this process twice or three times to until the inside looks as like mashed potato.- Add 30 g of Gyuhi into the bowl and mix well with a wood spatula. If the Gyuhi is firm, heat the bowl 30 seconds in microwave and then mix well until the Gyuhi dissolves into the white bean paste. Knead the dough until it becomes as soft as your earlobe, with adding Gyuhi bit by bit if needed.
Squeeze a wet cotton cloth well and unfold it on a table. Tear and put the dough to thumbnail-sized pieces in on the cloth. After tearing, pick the corners of the cloth up and knead the pieces into a dough again. Repeat this procedure three or four times until the dough is cool down. The dough is called 煉り切り餡 (Nerikiri An), which becomes smoother and whiter by including air.- If you would like to color the Nerikiri An, add and mix a particle of colorant into a part of the dough to make it deeper color. Then, knead it with the rest of the dough to color uniform.
- Divide the dough into 12 balls and spread each of them into flat disk sheets in palm-size. Put one of the An paste balls made in the direction #1 on the dough sheet, and then wrap the ball by closing the edge of the sheet.
- Tool #6 in your favorite shape with your fingers, pallets, toothpicks, etc.
Notes & Arrangements
- Nerikiri An is sometimes made with つくね芋 (Tsukune Imo / A kind of Japanese yam) instead of Gyuhi.
- The direction #2 is the procedure called 火取り (Hidori) with microwave oven. If you make Nerikiri An with a pan, the directions #2 to #4 is rewritten as follows: Put Shiro Koshi-An paste into a large pot with round bottom and knead the paste with a sparula at very low heating range. When the paste becomes warm, add Gyuhi and mix well. When the dough becomes firm not to stick to your hands, turn heating off and immediately move the dough on a tray. Cover it with a plastic film and leave it to cool down. Please beware against burning yourself.
- If you use Matcha (powdered green tea) to color the Netikiri An to green, please extend the time of Hidori a little longer in the direction #2 to reduce the moisture in the Shiro Koshi-An, because of dampness of Matcha powder.
You can substitute a table knife or a butter spreader for a pallet to tool Nerikiri. 三角べら (Sankaku Bera / Triangle wood pallet: shown in the photo) is useful to make a V-shaped nick, double fine lines and so on. If you are a resident around Champaign-Urbana, you can borrow it at UIUC Japan House. Of course, you can make it by yourself. You can also borrow some wood molds for Nerikiri at UIUC Japan House. In addition, toothpick, small cookie shape and so on can be used for tool.- Please seal the rest of Nerikiri An with plastic films during dressing because it is dried up quickly.
- After finishing, please seal the Nerikiri sweets into containers to keep the moisture in the sweets. If you do not mind that the taste may become a little worse, you can freeze the sweets and thaw at room temparature before eating.
Examples
Color the Nerikiri An to yellow (10 g), deep pink (10 g) and light pink (the rest). Stuffing is Shiro Koshi-An.
Wrap each Shiro Koshi-An ball with the light pink Nerikiri An dough. Round each of them into a sphere.
Divide the deep pink dough into soybean-sized balls. Put one of them on the top of #2, and spread the deep pink ball with your thumb in order to gradate the boundary of the deep pink on the light pink.- Push #3 lightly with your palms, and then make five nicks from the top to the side of the ball in the shape of five flower petals by using a pallet. Make a line at the center of each petal, and then make a nick at the side of each petal in the shape of peach flower.
- Divide the yellow dough into soybean-sized balls. Push one of them out through a fine sieve. Put the yellow fine lines onto the center of the flower-shaped sweet as like stamens of peach flower, by using toothpicks or chopsticks with fine tips.
References
- The photos of Nerikiri sweets at Japan House (Spring, 2003).
