A labour of love: making hoshigaki
Hello from snowy Kamikatsu
A gentle hello from snowy Kamikatsu. It’s only snowed a couple of times these past weeks and each time it usually melts by midday, but oh how magical is to wake up to snow!
Every year, growing up in Canada, I would feel a certain melancholy when summer was ending. It was the metaphoric conclusion of carefree and long days into a darker, cooler, and quieter season. I learned to love the cozy layering of knits and wools, but I will always feel nostalgia for summer. There was always one caveat to the melancholy transition—autumn was the season for apples.
I grew up going almost every year to an apple orchard, where my family and I would ride a wagon and pick apples into a basket. There would be rows and rows of apple trees. At the start of each row, there would be a picketed sign listing the variety of apples that lay in the vertical distance beyond the sign. We’d take apples home in kilograms and eat several apples a day.
We’d plan our annual apple picking based on the season of our favourite apples. My mom and I would bite into a store-bought McIntosh and say things like ‘it’s not quite the season yet, let’s wait’. I love the crunchiness of a Red Delicious or the balanced flavours of an Ambroisa. I’d avoid the too-sweet varieties like Honey Crisp or Pink Lady, which are similar to Fuji or Hokuto (popular varieties grown in the northern part of Japan). But more than any red or yellow apple, my favorite is the least sweet and most tart green Granny Smith.
I (seriously) digress… I’m falling into a spiral of talking about apples. What I wanted to say was that autumn for me was represented by the apple. Since moving to Japan, this has been replaced by kaki (柿) or persimmon. What a funny English word, persimmon. The kaki, though shaped much like an apple, that can fit into the palm of your hand, is not at all a replacement for the apple. I also didn’t grow up eating kaki so when I moved to Japan in 2020, I had my first conscious memory of trying this fruit. I was surprised by how readily available it was on trees almost anywhere in the countryside and farmer’s markets. I had no idea how to eat them, when to eat them, or how to tell the different types.
When I was living in Bangladesh, I also didn’t have access to local apples so instead, I deep dived into mangoes. I could identify about 8 different species of mangoes just by looking. There’s something really fun about digging deeper than the surface level of any food. Once you know an apple isn’t just an apple, or cheese isn’t just cheese, you get the joys of discovering nuances within one huge umbrella category.
So it’s not summer, it’s also not autumn anymore, and this isn’t writing about apples or mangoes, so let’s fast-forward to the present. I’m in my second year of discovering the absolute joys of this simple, quintessential autumn fruit known as the kaki and the winter snack known as hoshigaki. When the air gets cooler, it’s the cue that the season for kaki or persimmon has arrived.
Hoshigaki
There are two main types of kaki, one that can be eaten raw and one that can only be eaten after drying. The former is called fuyuugaki and it’s characterized by a round shape. The latter is known as hachiyagaki or shibugaki and it’s very astringent. If you don’t know what astringency tastes like, think of anything that makes your tongue dry and almost numb. However, once dried, the astringent kaki is transformed into hoshigaki, a tender and sweet (but not too sweet) bite-sized snack. Hoshigaki was one of the oldest types of dried fruit in Japan because it wouldn’t spoil over winter.
“That whole process takes a hard bitter unpalatable fruit, and time passes and it matures into something sweet,” Zauner says. “I felt, as someone with this narrative of writing about grief and loss and more bitter topics, embracing the sweeter side of life—embracing joy—was a fitting metaphor.” —Michelle Zauner (author of Crying in H-Mart)
If you’re curious about the drying process and why it turns an unedible food into something magically delicious, the simple explanation in layman’s terms is that the bitterness caused by tannins is broken down during drying. These tannins are water-soluble, meaning you taste bitter when you bite it fresh, but once dried, the moisture is drawn out and the natural sugars are concentrated on the surface.
I’m not going to write the step-by-step process in this post, but I learned from Terumi and her blog post here on her blog Kamikatsu Classical (access only to those in Japan/in Japanese only). For English, I think this is a good explanation.
In short, the first step is sourcing the kaki, in my case, I have the joys of living in the countryside where abundance is often shared. So I was told I could pick as many I wanted and I brought home a heaping bucket. The second step is to peel, string, boil (to disinfect), and hang them to dry.
The title of this newsletter, ‘a small labour of love’, is a reference to the final step of drying but also to the daily kneading that is required. After the first week, the kaki starts to shrivel and the skin begins to harden. From that point onwards, every day you gently kneed each kaki to make them softer and sweeter.
Kneading the hoshigaki has become a part of my morning routine, right before feeding the dogs and chickens. So I feel bittersweet about taking them down because now they’re ready to eat. I wish I could give everyone I know a hoshigaki to try! This lesser-known dried fruit, in my opinion, is worth trying to make and eat.
“The joy is in the journey” is an ageless (albeit cliche) adage that seems to perfectly apply to the process of making hoshigaki.
Last week I wrote about Kamikatsu’s last thatched roof house. Thank you to everyone who read it and supported the campaign! This week I helped the community cut straw that will be used for the thatched house.
I was sitting with a local grandpa while taking a break from cutting the kaya and he offered hoshigaki to all the volunteers. Excited I studied his hoshigaki and took a bite. It was much sweeter than mine and it had a light white powdered coating. It looks like sprinkled flour, and I’ve seen it before in markets, but I know how to make it myself. The whiteish coating is a natural crystallized sugar.
I asked Grandpa: What’s the secret to having a natural sugary coating on the outside? He said: I can’t tell you the secret, but try putting it in a ziplock bag with wara (rice straw). I smiled and laughed because he just gave me the secret. So next I will try that!
Have a wonderful afternoon and start of the week. Here’s a short poem by the late Thich Nhat Hanh, a Zen Buddhist monk, poet and peace activist who passed this week at age 95.
There’s a revolution that needs to happen and it starts from inside each one of us. We need to wake up and fall in love with Earth. Our personal and collective happiness and survival depend on it. — Thich Nhat Hanh
Wake up and fall in love with the Earth. How simple and profound.
As always, take care,
Kana
Please don't stop writing on Mondays. I've been in such a gloomy episode of my life and your writings make Mondays worth waking up for. I always look forward to how you end your newsletter too. Enchanting writing.