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Kurumi Tofu
Kurumi tofu — a walnut and kudzu jelly served as a meat-free sashimi substitute
Ground, strained walnut is thickened with sugar and kudzu starch, set firm and sliced in place of raw fish — a shojin dish from Oshu's Esashi area, served with a sweet miso-and-ginger sauce, made with local "oni-gurumi" walnuts.
- Origin: Iwate Oshu
- About 400 km north of Tokyo
What it's made of
A vegetarian dish from Esashi in Oshu city: ground walnuts strained, mixed with water and sugar, and set with kudzu starch. It's essentially goma-dofu with the sesame swapped for walnuts, and because it uses local onigurumi walnuts, it carries a clean, mild flavor with little bitterness. It is typically served with shredded daikon and a sweetened miso sauce laced with ginger juice.
How it's made
Ground walnuts are strained with water, mixed with sugar and kudzu starch, and cooked, stirring, until set. It is poured into a square mold and cooled at room temperature. A sauce of miso, sugar, ginger juice, sake and water is poured over it, though it is also eaten plain as a tea accompaniment, it is said. Removing the walnuts' bitter inner skin is said to be a laborious step.
Why it took this shape
Kurumi-doufu is said to have been made as a vegetarian stand-in for sashimi at Obon and memorial observances. Walnuts run so deep in Iwate's food culture that "delicious" is sometimes expressed as kurumi-aji, "walnut flavor." The dish is thought to have endured as a distinctly Esashi vegetarian preparation built around making careful use of the local onigurumi walnut.
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
Contrast
- Ocha MochiRice-flour dumplings are skewered, flattened, steamed and grilled with a walnut glaze — a Morioka-area treat once toasted over the hearth, its name said to come from a resemblance to a war-fan shape.
- Ukogi no HorohoroBlanched, chopped young shoots of the hedge shrub ukogi are mixed with miso-pickled daikon and walnut into a savory topping — a spring dish from around Morioka that makes use of a plant once relied on in famine years, eaten spooned over rice.
- Tofu DengakuFirm cotton tofu is skewered and grilled over charcoal, then dipped in garlic miso — grown out of northern Iwate's homemade-tofu culture in a prefecture with high tofu consumption, its miso seasoned seasonally with butterbur sprout or sansho.
Also from Iwate
- Azuki BattoRested wheat dough cut into wide noodle strips is served in a sugar-sweetened red-bean broth — made along the Sanriku coast for building-raising and harvest celebrations, with a custom of eating it seven times on the seventh day of Obon for good health.
- Hecchoko DangoDumplings of millet and sorghum flour, each dimpled in the center, are simmered in a sweet red-bean soup — also called "ukiuki dango," a harvest-close treat from rice-poor northern Iwate where they float to the surface as they cook.
- Hina ManjuRice-flour dough tinted with food coloring is wrapped around red-bean paste and shaped into flowers, peaches or rabbits using wooden molds — tied to a doll-viewing custom in Hanamaki's Ohasama area, offered alongside kirisensho at the Girls' Festival.
- Hizu NamasuThin slices of cartilage from a salmon's head — "hizu" — are salted, cured in vinegar and tossed with daikon and carrot namasu — a rare delicacy from just one small part of the fish, a New Year dish where salmon run up Miyako Bay.
- Dento Mochi RyoriAn umbrella term for some 300 ways of dressing mochi — sweet red bean, edamame paste, walnut, natto, zoni and more. A domain-era custom of pounding mochi twice a month left Ichinoseki with a "mochi calendar" of 60-plus occasions a year and a formal ceremonial mochi course still observed today.
- Imo no Ko JiruAutumn taro is simmered with chicken, tofu, daikon and carrot in a soy broth — a fall favorite of the taro-growing Kitakami river valley, still enjoyed at riverside "imoni-kai" gatherings around Kitakami's Futako district.