"adzuki beans" news and stories

Chili with a sweet side? Bring it on. Blogger flyzipper (which, we assume, has nothing to do with food, but let's just stop there) turns up the heat in this vegetarian chili with jalapeños and hot banana peppers, but balances it with sweet potatoes, red bell peppers, and adzuki beans (as well as black beans). Adzuki are the mellow-flavored red beans used well in Asian foods, such as the sweet and sticky daifuku mochi (rice cakes stuffed with red-bean paste).

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Grains, beans, and other legumes make up a large part of the Asian diet. In fact, at the Korean market, entire aisles can be dedicated to beans alone. Koreans add beans to white rice, creating a "mixed" steamed rice. My mother did this a few times when we were kids because there are a lot of health benefits, but when we saw bowls of steamed rice tainted with giant red, purple, and black beans, we wouldn't touch it. She made two pots of rice every night after that. One with plain white rice, and one with a mixture.

Some of us may be familiar with adzuki beans after they have been cooked down to almost a paste. They beans are sweet and nutty, but they are made sweeter with the addition of sugar and honey and used as a filling in pastries like Japanese mochi and Korean dduk. Koreans also use the beans to make "jook," a sweet porridge.

More Korean market food finds:
Dae chu - Korean red dates, aka jujubes
Ume (Japanese plum) cactus honey
All-in-one packaged sahm-gyae-tahng - Korean chicken soup
Ready-steamed bahp - rice
Clam jerky
Bahn-chan bar - salad bar of Korean side dishes