Japanese desserts

Japanese dessert tradition — particularly the formal sweets called wagashi — runs on a very small set of ingredients and an unusual attention to season. Sweetened red-bean paste (anko), glutinous rice (mochi), kanten (Japanese agar), kuzu starch, matcha and seasonal fruit do most of the work. There is comparatively little dairy, almost no chocolate (in the traditional canon), and an emphasis on just-sweet that surprises Western palates the first time they encounter it.

Wagashi were developed over centuries in close conversation with the chanoyu tea ceremony, where each sweet is chosen to mark the moment of the year — cherry-blossom mochi in spring, salt-cured cherry leaves in late spring, kuzumochi for the heat of August, chestnuts and persimmons in autumn. Outside the tea-room, the broader Japanese sweet world also encompasses yōshoku Western-inflected desserts (anpan, melon-pan, mochi cheesecake) and street sweets (taiyaki, dorayaki) that wear their modernity proudly.

To cook Japanese sweets is to work in restraint. The line between not sweet enough and just right is narrow; the line between just right and too sweet is narrower still.