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demonslayedher · 2 years

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Obligatory recipe preamble: I hate cooking. I'll try it out if it has a Kimetsu no Yaiba theme, though, and for this episode of Kimetsu Kitchen, we're making Rengoku-san's favorite. Not just satsuma-imo (sweet potatoes), but specifically, satsuma-imo miso soup! There's also a couple bonus Mugen Train related recipes (no, we're not preparing a meal of over 200 sleepy passengers).

Let me start by saying I'm not a huge fan of satsuma-imo. Among sweet gourds and potatoes and chestnuts, I find them irritatingly sweet without being a satisfying sweet. I can eat them, but I find their flavor overpoweringly like a waxy feeling all over my mouth. Anything for Rengoku-san, though.

That also meant making miso soup. I have never, ever been good at making miso soup, even the kind that comes in instant packets. I rarely buy miso because I live alone, don't have that many recipes I like using it in, and the packages tend to be huge and last so long that I can never trust the "best consumed by" date because I leave the package open so long before I can get remotely close to finishing it. However, that meant I was able to experiment day after day with failed miso soup recipe before hitting upon a method I felt confident using for this recipe.

What most recipes will tell you is you don't boil miso soup. Sounds fake, but ok. The other thing you see in miso soup commercials is that they put some of the hot dashi broth in a ladle held in the left hand over the pot, and then stir it with chopsticks held in the right hand. I am talented with chopsticks but not a ladle. I failed at this many times. I suppose I shall never be a Japanese bride. Shufu fail. The way I Gaijin Smash my way through miso soup is to put the miso paste in an entirely separate bowl and stir it with two spoons which I can use to spread out the clumps. Which it pulverized to my liking, I pour it back in with the hot/warm dashi and other ingredients and give it a stir.

For the rest of my meal, I made an Enbashira Haori Salad (with a bed of daikon, and since daikon are huge I later used the rest of it for second attempts at Giyuu & Muichiro's favorite foods), and had shijimi clams with my rice because they are supposed to be good for your liver, so they're the kind of thing Rengoku-san would had encouraged his father to eat. My Rengoku-san cup is filled with water as opposed to liquid fire, though.

Finally, I had grilled salmon picked up as-is from the grocery store both because I didn't feel like cooking another dish and because this was my dinner the previous night. If you follow Kimetsu Academy, you know. You know.

As for the results of the satsuma-imo miso soup?

It would be an exaggeration to say that I shouted "UMAI" but I did, totally legit, take one bite and make a big,

MM!!!!

sound. I was very surprised just how good it tasted! I think what really did it for me was that instead of being any old miso soup, it had a brightness to it thanks to the satsuma-imo, but the miso was what really served the potato. It brought out the savory undertones I really appreciate in gourds and root vegetables that lean a bit to the sweet side, like the saltiness smoothed that overpoweringly waxy sweetness so I could appreciate the wider flavor profile of the potato. I would love to repeat this success!!

However, it should be noted that because single-sized portions of miso soup can be a pain, I would up eating two portion sizes and it was a very yomoya-yomoyada night. That, and I still had half a sweet potato...

Anyway, I checked back on that Taisho Secret in the first fanbook where we first learn that sweet potatoes make Rengoku-san shout "WASSHOI," and found a few other culinary details.

"He had a gyunabe bentou (beef hotpot boxed lunch) on the train. His favoite bentou side dish is salted and grilled tai (sea bream), and satsuma-imo gohan for the rice. When he eats satsuma-imo he says wasshoi wasshoi." Although I don't recall what first it was, that means the beef bentou I had at the winter 2021 collaboration with the Kyoto Railway Museum was perhaps one of the more accurate takes on Rengoku-san's bentou out there. While I didn't feel like dealing with fish, like I said, I still had more sweet potato. So I made satuma-imo gohan! Sweet potato in rice! I don't feel like telling you what English-language food bloggers will do better, go follow a recipe like this.

Thinking back to food on the train, maybe Tanjiro didn't wind up eating any bentou apart from what Rengoku-san stuffed down his throat in the opening theme, but there were a lot of mentions of food with the Kamado family.

Like... making senbei out of old rice cakes! But that would require having a way to grill rice cakes, and like, having rice cakes... so I just bought senbei to snack on instead.

Or... making takuan to steal from your brother! I did still have lots of daikon, after all, why not try pickling it like the Kamado family would? Because I've read this can be a stinky practice, that's why. My kitchen has no window, no thank you. I bought takuan for a side dish instead.

Mountain greens? No thank you, I've already suffered through tara-no-me.

If we turn to some other Taisho Secrets, though, there were a few exclusively printed in the booklet handed out at the first showings of Mugen-Ressha in Japan. To borrow from my translation of them which can be found here...

"What was Tanjirou’s mother most skilled at cooking? Tanjirou’s mother was very skilled at cooking, she made a wide variety depending on each season. She also really liked trying out regional recipes that other people shared with her. Her children’s favorites were sanma-no-soba dumplings and tofu baked in miso. (Translation note: Sanma-no-soba dango is a rural dish from the Nagano area, a decent distance northwest from where Tanjirou’s family lived (see my post about canon geography here). It has a piece of mackerel pike wrapped in a dough made of buckwheat flour.)" Let me say that I appreciate Kie, perhaps even project on her a bit, since I have a mole in the same spot and have feelings toward Tanjiro and Nezuko which can be described as "My Son" and "My Daughter." That, and I've been curious about those sanma soba dumplings ever since learning of them through this Taisho Secret.

...I dislike cooking, so my similarities with Kie end here. However, the photos of the process of making this rural snack in a traditional irori style hearth do strongly tempt me to travel to Nagano just for the sake of finding some Obaasans to teach (as in, do it for me), because wow, that is aesthetic. So that left me to make Tofu Dengaku, that is, baked tofu with a miso glaze. After all, I still had have tons of miso. I don't feel like teaching you how to do it badly, go read a foodie blog. I will say that perhaps unlike the majority of my blog readers, I love tofu. I love eating it (but I don't play cello), and I don't mind cooking with it because even if I get it wrong I still find it palatable. That's good, because there were big mouthfuls of tofu here to go with my satsuma-imo gohan and takuan pickles I picked up from the store. I had bought a nice new jar of turmeric with the intention of attempting takuan, but instead I just stir-fried my mushrooms with it. Mushrooms are totally something Kamado children would eat with their mountain greens, right?

Both the satsuma-imo gohan and tofu dengaku were supposed to be decorated in sesame seeds, but I did not have any. I had pure black sesame seed spread though! Like the fun of eating charcoal without the silly (and dangerous) food-fadiness of it! This also tends to have a waxy, over-powering flavor which I find often needs some sweetness to bring out its nice flavors (like pairing it with honey on toast), or perhaps the saltiness of the miso to help bring out the other sides of its flavors. So that's what those big black globs are. Learn from my mistake, maybe don't put big globs of this stuff on anything. Oh, and the decorative little yellow spot is mustard. You know. Because fancy.

I've had... better dengaku, we'll put it that way.

And the rice? Well, there was mirin in the recipe, which seemed to make the sweet satsuma-imo even sweeter, which I just didn't enjoy much in a rice dish. No 'wasshoi' or 'umai' outta me on this one, but hey, I tried.

#Kimetsu Kitchen #Rengoku Kyojuro #Rengoku Kyoujurou #look at the sweet potatoes on the placemat in that first pic #didn't they turn out well!?!? it really looks like Rengoku-san is eating them!#...eating them raw #Rengoku-san no please cook them #set your potatoes ablaze #and also #KnY Closet Play #Kamado Kie

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