What's in your mochi?
It's ichigo daifuku season!
Daifuku is a traditional Japanese confection made with pounded glutinous rice, or mochi, and stuffed with a sweet filling, typically red bean paste. Daifuku is, hands-down, my favorite kind of Japanese confection. And ichigo daifuku, or strawberry daifuku, is in season right now. This stuff is amazing, a daifuku with a whole, fresh strawberry on the inside and, often, red bean paste as well.
I take my role as a blogger very seriously, and I've been doing taste tests of as many ichigo daifuku (pronounced "ee-chee-goh" "dye-foo-koo") as I can get my hands on. The largest ichigo daifuku I've tried is the one seen in the picture above. It's an award-winning ichigo daifuku from Shimaya, a sweets shop located in the town of Katata, half an hour northeast of Kyoto. Their daifuku are huge, practically the size of my palm (who says size doesn't matter?), and they're stuffed with white bean paste and a big, sweet strawberry.
My favorite ichigo daifuku so far, though, is from the small daifuku shop around the corner from me. Yes, when I feel the winter blues, one of the things that perks me up is knowing that I am, literally, a minute away from a family-run daifuku shop. I stop there at least once a week, and the friendly owner there now recognizes me whenever I pass by (likely as the smiley girl who speaks broken Japanese and really, really likes daifuku).
The kind of ichigo daifuku she sells varies each day—sometimes they have bean paste and a strawberry inside them, and sometimes they have just a strawberry. They're simple and homemade, unpretentious and delicious.
The prettiest kind of ichigo daifuku I've seen features the strawberry perched on top of the mochi, like a crown. It's a less common style, but oh-so-pretty. I bought these from a confection stand at Keihan Sanjo station in Kyoto.
The green one had a green bean paste filling, while the white one had a red bean paste filling. Both were as delicious as they look.
Which, come to think of it, doesn't surprise me very much in this great, delicious country.
