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Konetsuke
Konetsuke — leftover rice kneaded with wheat flour and pan-fried
Leftover rice is kneaded with wheat flour, sliced into rounds, pan-fried, and coated with a sweet miso or walnut-miso glaze — a dish of northern and eastern Nagano said to have been eaten by the warlord Sanada Yukimura before battle, born of the wisdom of using every last grain of rice.
- Origin: Nagano
- About 160 km northwest of Tokyo
What it's made of
Leftover rice is kneaded with wheat flour until it comes together, sliced into rounds, and pan-fried in oil. The outside turns crisp and toasty while the inside keeps a chewy, mochi-like give, locals say. Finished with a glaze of sweet miso, walnut miso, or chili miso, the toasty crust is said to pick up a rich, sweet-savory edge. Some households work chopped shiso or garlic chives into the dough.
How it's made
Leftover rice is mixed with wheat flour and kneaded until it holds together, then shaped and sliced into rounds. Both sides are browned in a pan or on a griddle, and a glaze of sweet miso or walnut miso is brushed on to finish, people say. Even the rice grains left stuck in the pot were dried and worked back in -- a habit said to reflect letting nothing go to waste.
Why it took this shape
In an age when rice was precious, mixing in wheat flour to stretch a small portion of rice into a filling meal is said to be how this dish began. A story is also told of a warlord eating it before heading into battle, suggesting it traveled well as portable food. In a household without refrigeration, it seems to have settled in as a way to make leftover rice taste good again the next day and beyond.
Before you go
- How to shop at a supermarketHow to choose prepared foods, sashimi, and packaged sushi, when discount stickers tend to appear, region-only specialties, buying by weight, the checkout and bagging flow, and sampling etiquette at a local supermarket.
- Food for Obon and the harvest moon (tsukimi)A guide to the meat-free shojin ryori and somen served at Obon, and the tsukimi dango offered on the night of the harvest moon.
- At teishoku diners, shokudo, and machi-chukaA guide to the teishoku set-meal format, free rice refills, table placement, and paying at a shokudo-style diner.
Dishes in the same style
- Agonoko UmaniThe roe of egg-bearing flying fish, caught only in early summer, is simmered in stock and soy sauce as an Oki bar snack. Its large grains and dense, sticky texture are prized as a delicacy said to be scarcer even than the fish's flesh.
- Funa MisoCrucian carp is simmered slowly with soybeans for around five hours, then finished in a sauce of red miso and coarse sugar. A freshwater fish dish of the Kiso rivers' lower basin, made with fatty winter carp simmered until the bones soften through.
Ingredients and dishes from this land
Also from Nagano
- Anyoji RamenSaku's miso ramen built around Anyoji miso, held to be the root of Shinshu miso.
- Gudakusan Miso ShiruRoot vegetables like daikon, carrot, and burdock go generously into this everyday miso soup of Nagano. Packing it with vegetables is said to allow less miso overall, and wheat dumplings are sometimes dropped in to make it a meal in itself.
- HangoroshiSticky rice, pounded only halfway to a texture called hangoroshi, is coated in sweet bean paste or roasted soybean flour — eastern Nagano's version of botamochi and ohagi, called one name in spring and the other in autumn, a festive sweet that busy farm households could put together quickly.
- Hitashi MameGreen soybeans are boiled until still faintly crisp, then steeped in a lightly seasoned dashi — a dish of northern and eastern Nagano also made with the saddle-marked kurakake bean, sometimes paired with herring roe as part of New Year's osechi.
- Hoshikabocha no EgomaaeKabocha squash, sliced into strips and sun-dried until brittle, is rehydrated and tossed in ground perilla seed — a preserved dish of the Kinasa area born from the need to keep squash, which spoils easily over winter, also used simmered or as filling for oyaki.
- Hoba MakiRice-flour dough kneaded with hot water wraps sweet bean paste, then steams inside a magnolia leaf — a Kiso festival mochi. With no oak trees in the mountains, magnolia stood in, and locals say the leaf's scent settles in best the next day.