How to Make Kurikinton Chestnut Sweets in Northern Japan

     Now this treat is a traditional Japanese treat, but it's specific to one area of Japan which I no longer live in. My first autumn in Japan happened in Gifu prefecture, way down south in Chubu, somewhere between Nagoya and Kyoto. It was marvelous and amazing and one of the things that the town I lived in was most known for were these delicious little Chestnut sweets.

     They meant a lot to me and were very delicious. In my 2 years in that area, I came to associate fall very much with this specific flavor. Since moving to northern Japan, I've come to find that the term Kurikinton has a totally different meaning up here. They think what is candied chestnuts on rice, or just nuts with some sort of mashed element. They absolutely in no way understand that I want a lovely little dumpling of soft sweetness.

A basic search of the internet comes up with plenty of different recipes for different dishes called Kurikinton by someone, but only one looks like the delicacy I'm looking for, and that's the bottom left.

     So it has become been kind of sad for me to go through fall in Northern Japan where the only place I have found my Kurikinton was the bottom level of a department store in Sendai once a few years ago.

Sweetened chestnuts that I didn't realize were sweetened until after I bought the proper confectioners sugar, but it needed the fancy sugar to become what I wanted.l anyway.

     This year, one of my students who is from the north misunderstood my call for Kurikinton and sent me canned, sweetened chestnuts. Now, the idea there for the average person up here would be of to just apply these to rice and mix them and eat them that way. This is not what I'm going to do because I don't actually enjoy that dish. I am going to use a recipe I found online to make a snack that I actually want them to become.

     I was surprised by how many of the recipes claimed to be what I was looking for but then wanted to include sweet potato. I'm sure that's not quite right so I kept looking and found one that only used chestnuts, a specialty confectioners sugar I had to order on Amazon, and a pinch of salt.

     The first step for me was emptying the chestnuts into a pan on the lowest heat setting. The recipe called for raw chestnuts but I was determined to use up these cans of chestnut instead so I skipped a couple of steps including boiling and shelling the nuts. I jumped to putting them in a pan and mashing them up.

The 100 yen potato masher came in handy.

     After mashing up all the chunks, start adding sugar. Since these were already sweetened, I scaled back. Instead of the 80 grams of the wasanbonto sugar per 500 grams of chestnut, I wound up using around 25 grams, slowly adding and tasting it until it tasted right.

Add. Mix. Taste. Repeat.

     Then I let them cool in the pan. The cooking took a little less than 20 minutes. After they were cool, I wrapped them in individual servings in plastic wrap and put them on the fridge overnight.

They look like garbage. They taste like heaven.

     The next day I took one out for a taste and was as happy about the flavor as I was sad about the presentation. It doesn't look right yet, but finally fall has arrived once again for my taste buds.