- [Alvin] Thank you to Bokksu for sponsoring this episode.
Bokksu is a monthly subscription service
that delivers premium Japanese snacks and tea pairings
straight from Japan to your door.
They even partner with 100-plus-year-old family businesses
to make signature treats you can't find anywhere else.
Here are some of the snacks that I got this month.
If you wanna taste these snacks for yourself,
head to the link in the bio and use code ALVIN
to get $15 off your order.
(Erina speaking in Japanese) (celestial music)
(Soma speaking in Japanese)
(Ryoko speaking in Japanese)
(Hisako speaking in Japanese)
Hello there.
Welcome back to another episode of "Anime With Alvin,"
where this week, I'm taking a look
at the souffle pancakes from "Food Wars!",
a dish that is a bit more complex than it looks.
The key to this dish seems to lie within the red bean paste,
which turns a stack of souffle pancakes
into something more reminiscent of dorayaki.
To get started, I rinse the azuki beans,
and then I'm putting them into a pressure cooker.
They go in here with a couple cups of water,
and I'm cooking them for around 30 minutes or so.
Pretty scared of pressure cookers,
so I'm just gonna let you do your thing
while I watch from far away.
Once the 30 minutes are up,
I'm straining the beans once more
and placing them in a food processor to...
Oh. Uh, you just...
Okay. Is this "Black Mirror"?
I'm looking for an ultra-smooth consistency,
so I'm passing the paste through a sieve,
just to make sure I catch any bits left behind.
After we have our paste, we're transferring this into a pan
to cook with a cup of brown sugar and a little bit of salt.
The color's gonna go from a pale purple
to an extremely deep and dark violet.
This is what we're looking for,
'cause it signifies the paste has thickened,
the water's gone, and it's reduced to a nice consistency
that'll thicken after cooling.
Moving on to the pancake molds, I'm just...
Hey! Who put my stuff like this, huh?
These are tall stainless-steel pastry rings
that will serve as the mold for our pancakes.
To ensure an easy release, they've been sprayed
with a nonstick spray, and I'm cutting up some parchment
to fold in order to fit along the inside of each mold.
Once the molds are prepped,
it's time to move on to the next part.
In the show, it's shown
that the character is making Greek yogurt
using a makeshift assembly rig
constructed by a bowl, two chopsticks,
a colander, and coffee filters.
I'm portioning out a hefty amount
of just whole-milk normal yogurt
into these two coffee filters on the colander.
Even after a couple of seconds, you can see
that the whey is already dripping.
Man, I wish I had drip like that.
This does take some time, so I'm gonna leave this
to go for about an hour or two.
The longer you go, the thicker it gets.
This batch of yogurt is good to go.
On to the garnish for the pancakes: a black sesame tuile.
Here I have some toasted black sesame seeds,
which I'm gonna grind up in a mortar and pestle
roughly, but not down to a fine powder.
This stuff smells great, kinda like tangyuan.
Moving on to the cookie batter itself.
Into a small bowl, I'm combining flour,
water, sugar, honey, and melted unsalted butter,
along with a couple teaspoons of those black sesame seeds.
Give this batter a little taste.
I don't know why I did that.
This is raw.
Once the batter is smooth,
I'm now making the stencils for the tuile.
This will help give its circular, perfectly round shape.
So I'm gonna use a inverted teacup on a strip of acetate,
trying to cut out as perfect of a circle as I can.
And after washing off the Expo marker thoroughly,
I'm adhering it to a tray lined with silpat with gaff tape,
'cause I, I'm a video guy.
Taking a dollop of the tuile batter,
I'm spreading a very thin layer across
to try to fill the circle but not have it too thick.
If it's too thick, the tuiles won't bubble
and create that lacy texture we're looking for.
After repeating this about seven or eight times,
these go in a preheated oven at 350 for about 10 minutes.
These are done when the entirety of the cookie
is a deep, dark golden brown, and these smell great.
But it's not the texture I was looking for,
so I'm adding some sugar and butter on the fly
just to loosen up the batter a little bit.
I think I threw away the stencil with the gaff tape,
so I'm just gonna freehand these instead.
And with the help of that extra sugar and butter,
this round of cookies came out
with that lacy texture I was looking for.
Finally, on to the souffle pancake batter itself.
This is a two-part batter,
and the first part consists of combining two egg yolks
with 1/2 ounce of granulated sugar, some cake flour,
baking powder, kosher salt, and whole milk.
This is a thick, paste-like batter
that is going to be aerated
by the second portion of this batter,
which starts by whipping four large egg whites
in a stand mixer with the whisk attachment
and slowly streaming in 2.5 ounces of sugar.
We're gonna whip this as it slowly, slowly comes together
into soft, fluffy peaks.
When that's ready to go, I'm first folding in 1/3
of the egg whites into the base of the egg yolk batter.
I'm essentially offering up these egg whites
to the egg yolks as a sacrifice.
After the first sacrifice, I'm now folding in two ounces
of the Greek yogurt we made.
According to the show, this is supposed
to provide a tanginess that goes well
with the rest of the flavors in this pancake.
Here I am folding the rest of the egg whites
into the batter, praying that I'm not over-folding
but also not under-folding
because, well, that would be bad.
The batter is now ready to be cooked.
Into a nonstick pan goes the mold
that we had prepared earlier.
I'm ladling in the pancake batter
about 75 to 80% of the way up,
covering with a lid, and letting this cook
for about 10 minutes or so.
What we're doing here is simultaneously
crisping up the bottom of the pancake
and steaming the fluffy inside batter
until it reaches the top.
And honestly, that's when I know
it's about ready to be turned.
I know you're not supposed to use steel in a nonstick pan,
but if I didn't, there's no way to get this out.
I'm not gonna lie, this part is probably
the hardest part of the whole recipe,
and instead of flipping the pancake onto the pan,
I'm flipping the pan onto the pancake.
And a one, two, three, whoo!
All right, a little bit of spillage. That's okay.
And if you're not spilling when you're cooking,
it's just cooking.
I'm gonna cover this up again
and let it go for another 10 minutes
until it's really started to get big and bouncy.
After releasing the sides with an offset spatula
and unwrapping this little parchment paper towel,
we have our fully disrobed first souffle pancake.
Now, that's the kind of jiggle I wanna see.
I'm repeating the process with a second pancake.
Batter in, 10 minutes, pan on the pancake, flip,
admire the smooth butt, 10 minutes, out, time to plate.
Before we stack the second pancake,
we have to place the red bean filling on the first one,
smoothing it out into a nice pattern
and creating a sticky base
for the second pancake to go onto.
And after another disrobe of the parchment,
it's time to stack.
Here I am carefully placing the souffle pancake on top,
trying not to jiggle and deflate this too much.
All right, it is now time for the garnishes.
First goes down powdered sugar,
then a tablespoon of butter and a nice drizzle
of golden syrup used in the episode, not maple syrup.
Kendall kindly prepared me some Chantilly cream,
which is going to be used in order
to hold up the black sesame tuiles.
This is quite the balancing act.
The heat of the pancakes is melting the cream,
making it really difficult to hold things upright.
Additionally, I'm adding
some loose pineapple leaves and some rosemary flowers
that we actually picked out of the back garden.
After playing a little game
of "Is this gonna stand up?",
I present to you our version of the souffle pancakes
from "Food Wars!", inspired heavily by dorayaki.
Here I am trying to get a spoonful of everything,
cutting all the way down
and getting some of the red bean paste in the process.
It is quite sweet, but it is very, very, very comforting,
and that touch of red bean paste is a really nice addition.
Ooh, these black sesame tuiles are really good.
All right, well, this is gonna get messy really soon,
so I'm gonna let the team come in and dig a little bit,
because they've been working hard and I should feed them.
Thanks again for our friends over at Bokksu
for supporting this episode.
I think it's pretty cool
that I can get authentic Japanese snacks
that are usually hard to find delivered straight to me.
This month's theme is Bokksu Tanjoubi,
and guess what that means?
It's Bokksu's birthday!
They're turning six and they're celebrating
with a collection of their staff
and their subscribers' favorite snacks.
In every box, there's also a booklet that tells you more
about each month's theme and where the snacks come from.
But my favorites this month have to be these mochi truffles.
They had, like, a little strawberry
and ganache filling inside.
Super good.
To try Bokksu for yourself, head to the link in the bio
and use code ALVIN to get $15 off your order.
(mellow music)