O-Shiruko: I Tried Making Red Bean Soup using Coffee

The other day, an online news article on a traditional Japanese winter dish called “O-shiruko (お汁粉)” caught my attention because the recipe introduced there sounded interesting.

The Azuki red bean soup used black coffee in place of water, and the making was quite simple. 

Coffee Shiruko (コーヒー汁粉)

And today, I prepared ingredients for that coffee shiruko recipe, as I wanted to try it.

Specifically, I bought a canned black coffee and a package of Koshian (smooth sweetened red bean paste) at a store, as the Kirimochi rectangular mochi was in stock in my house.

Recipe

The recipe was easy enough, but I was too lazy to follow the original directions, and I simplified them, like the below.

First, I put a Kirimochi in the toaster oven and baked it at 230 degrees Celsius (446 degrees Fahrenheit) for about 5 minutes. 

While toasting the mochi, I placed about 100 grams of Koshian paste in the bowl

and poured about 100 ml of piping hot black coffee. (Because the original recipe uses black coffee and Koshian paste at a ratio of 1:1.)

I gave the mixture a good stir

and carefully put the cooked mochi into the soup.

Taste

As expected, the resulting soup was lukewarm, but the taste was good enough!

In this bowl, the bitterness of black coffee calms the cloying sweetness of Koshian paste, making the soup an acquired taste.