Comfort Foods

#5 and #6: Matsutake Mushrooms and Zenzai Mochi

Recently, we embarked on a mission to find Matsutake mushrooms. These mushrooms are usually really hard to find, making them an expensive fall food in Japan. Despite the price, many Japanese seek out these mushrooms for their wonderful aroma.


This is a Matsutake mushroom stand in Shiga. I was really surprised to learn that most Japanese think the taste of the mushrooms is just futsu, or ordinary, but that the smell is so good they're willing to pay upwards of $50.00 (or more!) for only a few. Contrarily, everyone seems to agree that Shiitake Mushrooms taste great, but the mushrooms sell for a much more reasonable, futsu price!

Yeah, I'm not joking. On the right hand side, you can see the four mushrooms available for purchase at over the equivalent of $65.00 USD.

So, are they worth the big bucks? We tried them in Matsutakegohan, or mushroom rice, and also in some soup and they were pretty delicious. Both of the dishes were prepared for us by some of our very generous friends, so we can't say we'd necessarily go out on our own and buy them. But hey, gotta' try everything once!

After we secured the mushrooms on our trip, we stopped at a traditional Japanese sweets shop to try just that--traditional Japanese sweets. The sweet we tried is called zenzai mochi, which is basically a sweet red bean soup with rice cake inside.

Yum! This sweet can be served both hot and cold, depending on the season. We had ours hot, and it was a very happy way to warm up in the fall weather.