The wasabi fiasco

i suppose most of my blog readers know this green sharp delicacy – peanuts or pea in wasabi batter. At first horseradishy hot, then saltysweet and always addictive:) And as you eat them, it just has to cross your mind „these can’t be too difficult to prepare“ while you munch another bag and find out you forgot to buy the ingredients for dinner while buying these peanuts.

  

Well, and what a cuisine experimenter would i be if i wouldn’t try to make them on my own! Of course i thought, hey, that has to be easy, it’s just some roundish stuff (peanuts, pea, whatever you can eat in this size class) covered in a wasabi(or whatever else)-spiced dough. It can’t be that difficult, right? Well, apparently, it can.

Of course, as it was my first time in this food area, i decided to get some help on the web and found one recipe that was cited more times and seemed to make sense (here). Shortly for those who don’t speak Czech yet:

You whisk egg white with water (easy) and add the nuts (in the recipe there are almonds or peanuts) so that each of them gets covered by the foam. Then you let them drain away (i might underestimated the draining) and you cover the nuts by mixture of wasabi powder, starch, salt and a bit of sugar. Then you put the nuts in an oven on 150°C for about half an hour and afterwards switch to 100°C for another 20 min. That sounds bloody easy, if it wasn’t for the oven business, you could have made it in kindergarten!

And now the reality:

My first try was with peanuts – as i could only get not-salty peanuts in the not-peeled version (and you actually create quite some mess while you peel them, i never realized that before), i decided to start with less than a ½ kg, as was in the recipe and more-less accordingly i adjusted the amounts of the other ingredients. Probably the first fail was in the draining, as i thought there should be some foam left in order to create that crunchy crust. Maybe they were not drained enough... The powder-covering phase didn’t go that well either, as part of the dough remained on the plastic bag i used for spreading the powder over the peanuts, ergo, the peanuts were not covered as much as i would like them to be. But show must go on, i put them on a baking paper and fiddle-dedee, into the oven! After about 20 minutes i have took them out, as they were getting really brown...well and the results were:

• as the peanuts cooled down, part of the crust fell apart
• they didn’t taste like wasabi or horseradish, they tasted more like slightly burnt brocoli
• most important of all, the were not a bit hot, not a slight taste of spiciness!

However, one fail is not going to discourage me! So then i moved on to pea, this time improvising on the motive of aforementioned recipe. As the wasabi reserves were getting low, i decided to use also normal horseradish. Well, to make a long story short, this time i added more starch, created a less liquid batter, covered the boiled pea ...well, quite a lot:

and threw it into the oven on a slightly lower temperature.

The result is edible, this time not burnt, but again...NOT HOT, you just don’t taste the wasabi, nor the horseradish! Oh, and as it was difficult to separate the peas without losing too much of the batter, i decided to do it after the preparation...so it looks a bit like an omelet:

The last try was my pure improvisation, and actually, that was quite good :) Recipe is easy:

Boil rice, as much as you wish, but boil it more than “al dente”. You don’t need to wash the rice before cooking, as you will find the starch useful. Once you have this pot of boiled rice, this rice-pudding, you add spices (i added curry powder, salt and a bit of sugar) and mix it well. You may experiment quite a lot in here: try various kinds of rice, spices, try to add whisked egg white, etc. If the mush is too liquid, you can add starch. And then you just spoon this mush on a baking paper and put it in the oven at approx. 150°C until it is done (sorry, i forgot to measure the time). And it’s crunchy, spicy, easy and original ;) Try it: