Shigure is a sweet bean paste Japanese snack, usually served in small roundish bite-sized morsels, and coming in a wide range of seasonal flavours, as bean paste has a very neutral and versatile taste. As the white bean paste easily takes up any colour applied to it, and the bean paste holds its shape well, it is also common for such sweets to be very beautifully coloured and artistically shaped and presented.
Minamoto Kitchoan is a Japanese sweets patisserie that has both traditional and Western-inspired Japanese snacks, often producing interesting fusion treats. This Blueberry Cheese Shigure was one of them - unusual because blueberry is a very Western flavour, and cheese is not normally blended in with the bean paste. It was also a seasonal offering for spring.
Visually, I loved how pretty it was - the white and blush of magenta was very lovely. The coloured layers inside were also a delight to the eyes.
The taste was equally remarkable.
It had very strong blueberry floral notes, with a very creamy and milk body. There was a pleasant combination of fragrance and creaminess, like in the blueberry-yoghurt combination, except that it was not as noticeably sour.The fermented cheesy flavour was not as distinct, and it came across more like a savoury milky custard with notes of condensed milk.
The closest experience that I have personally come across, would be the filling of salted egg yolk custard mooncakes from Hong Kong, except that those do not usually have fruity flavours. As those mooncakes are usually made from lotus paste mixed with egg, the texture is also similar to the moist but crumbly aspect of this bean paste sweet.
When we look at the ingredients list below (click image to enlarge), they did indeed use cheese. Furthermore, they also used egg yolk, which could explain the custard taste and similarity to egg yolk custard mooncake fillings. The concentrated blueberry juice might explain the strong fruity fragrance. Finally, the lemon juice might be why there was a bit of similarity to a blueberry yoghurt taste.
This is an image of the packaging. It came individually wrapped and was labelled as a "blueberry cheese ball", which is different from the ingredients list description.
Finally, this is an image of more traditional bean paste shigure with pure red bean (or azuki) filling, made during a traditional sweets workshop in Tokyo. As you can see, the colours and shape can very greatly. In this case, Minamoto Kitchoan innovated on the flavour quite significantly.
Discover more blueberry snacks
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