Kai’s Kitchen
Fine Teas and Brownies
Greeting friends. Well this is it. We’ve come a long way, but all good things must come to an end eventually. But don’t think that just because this is the last Kai’s Kitchen post, I didn’t want to make one last satisfying dish for you all. We’ve run the whole gauntlet here, from appetizers to entrees, there’s only one last thing we can do. Dessert! I’m going for something simple, something to remind you of home. Hot and cold, soft and crunchy, sweet and toasty; this can only be… Brownies and ice cream. Ah yes, one of the best combinations since tea leaves and water, but don’t get it twisted, we still have a fun tea addition to lift this classic combo from amazing to phenomenal!
Genmaicha Caramel Brownies with Persimmon Wakocha Ice Cream
Ingredients
1 cup of white chocolate chips
⅔ cups of butter
1 1/4 cup white sugar
2 large eggs
1 egg yolk
½ cup of all purpose flour
¼ cup Genmaicha powder
½ cup whole milk
½ cup cream
½ teaspoon vanilla extract
1 persimmon, pitted and diced
1 teaspoon of Wakocha powder
½ cup salt
1 cup of Ice
Recipe
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Fill a pot with water and place a heatproof bowl on top of it and turn the stove onto high. Put the butter and ½ the white chocolate chips into the bowl and stir until melted.
Beat the eggs and yolk. Once the butter and chocolate is melted, take off heat and slowly add 1 cup of sugar. Slowly pour and stir the beaten eggs into the mixture. When this is fully mixed, add the flour and genmaicha powder and fold until fully mixed.
Pour mixture into a greased brownie tray and place in oven for 30-35 minutes or until crispy and golden brown.
While this is cooking, we are going to work on our ice cream. I learned this way of making at-home Ice cream without an ice cream maker from Jerry James Stone, so I highly recommend you check out his Youtube channel. Take the whole milk, cream, sugar, vanilla extract, persimmons, and wakocha powder; and put all into a medium-sized plastic baggy, preferably one with a zip lock.
Next, fill a bowl full of ice and pour about ½ a cup of salt onto the ice. Get a larger baggie and fill it halfway with the ice. Place the medium baggie filled with our ingredients into the larger baggie. Fill to the top with the rest of the ice. This is our makeshift ice cream maker.
Wrap the baggie in a hand towel (it will get cold) and shake for a minimum of 5 minutes. The more you shake, the more firm the ice cream will become. If it isn’t quite as firm as you’d want it to be, you can place it into the freezer to firm up a bit.
Once the brownies are done, cut out a square and place into a bowl. Take the ice cream out of the freezer (if you put it there) and scoop out a fair amount and place on top of the brownie. Dust with Genmaicha powder if you’d like. Tah-da!
Well everyone, I’m sad to say that my time with you here is coming to an end. I started this blog only 8ish weeks ago, and it has gone by faster than I ever could have imagined. I’ve been cooking professionally for close to 10 years at this point, and I won’t sugar coat it (pun intended) when I say the work is sometimes not super fun. Working in restaurants, some days for 12-14 hours, running around in a hot kitchen while orders are flying in and you already have 10 salmon on the grill, 6 salads that need to be made, and 5 crab cake entrees in the oven — the work can be a little stressful. Somedays I wonder why I do it. As much as I love culinary arts and serving quality food that makes people happy, the job can extinguish even the brightest and hottest of passions.
Doing this blog has revived my passion for cooking. The amount of freedom that was given to me, to be able to make anything I want, with anything I want, however I want; made me really love cooking again. None of this would have been possible without the opportunities that Obubu offered. Making food for the other interns and getting feedback is something that was so important for me to grow not only as a chef, but as a person. Not only was cooking for other people great, but cooking for myself was something that I just hadn’t done in a long time. I would go to work and make food for people I didn’t know and rarely would ever get anything from it, just send the food out as another order came back. But here, I could make what I wanted to make and get, honestly, really excited about it.
I’d like to thank everybody here for making this happen. George really inspired me to make this blog and pushed me in all the right directions to actually make it. Without his guidance, I don’t know if I could have achieved this goal. Hiro-san, and Moe-san were always very supportive in giving me good feedback and Kon-chan was someone I could talk over some ideas with. I’d like to thank Robin for helping me through some rough points and making me realize that I could just cook for me. I’d like to thank Carly and Karen for always being great people to bounce ideas off and giving me the inspiration for dishes I never would have thought of, and Michelle, for being very supportive, even if she couldn’t really eat anything I made. This this last blog is for all of you amazing people I met here at Obubu, I wouldn’t trade this experience for the world.
Thank you. Really.
Well folks. That’ll do it. Though I’ll miss making these every week for you all, it’s time for me to cook somewhere else in the world. Where that’ll be next, I don’t know, but I’ll have Obubu to thank for renewing my love of the world culinary arts. Who knows, maybe in the future you’ll see me again, writing for a company I truly love, or cooking in my very own food truck. I hate saying goodbye, so I’ll end it with this, one last time.
Until next time, keep drinking spectacular teas and keeping cooking and eating delicious food!
Kai Masuchika, Chef, Obubu Intern
English (UK) 
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