Sweet smell of Japanese spring: making paste from Japanese mugwort (Yomogui)

In Japanese fields, there are several kinds of plants that are edible only for new shoots. This week I tell you my cooking excursion for one of such herbs. It is Japanese mugwort (Artemisia princeps), or Yomogui in Japanese. Actually, this is a weed we can find almost anywhere, even in roadsides of downtown Tokyo. We also frequently taste their slightly bitter flavor in many dishes, like green Udon pasta, bread, cookies, cakes, donuts, traditional Japanese sweets, etc. etc. We can buy powdered Japanese mugwort, and knead it into dough for such things all year round. Though, I think using paste made of freshly picked Japanese mugwort yields the best result. Here is how I prepared such paste this year.

In a supermarket.
 Everybody loves Yomogui sweet dumplings!

First, let’s identify the site where we can legally pick fresh AND uncontaminated Japanese mugwort. … er, it would be a matter of opinion … Yeah, you can pick new shoots of Yomogui from a roadside near Tokyo Station. I think there is no guarantee that plant is free from car exhaust, or pee of city poodles normally dwelling in a high rise of the area. I prefer safer option, and go to a large forest with clean air. 😉

I prefer not taking them.

Very young leaves of Japanese mugwort

The plant loves sunshine. We have to search for an open space with lesser possibility for daily walking routes of pooch … it would be tricky in city parks, I presume. Anyway, you go there and find plant, and pick just young shoots of it, preferably during morning. You bring your harvest to your kitchen ASAP, and start working with them. They are young weak shoots. They soon become very soggy, and taste bitter. The way to prepare Yomogui is easy, but takes 2 days to complete. Here is how:

First, wash the leaves well with cold running water
 to remove any grits or else.

Next, you put them in a large pan
 of boiling water with baking soda.
 A rough standard is,
 for 300g of fresh Yomogi,
 we need 5-6L of H2O with
 a heaping teaspoonful of baking soda.

Boil them until the leaves become creamy
 when you pick them with your finger.
 For 300g, it would take about 5-6 minutes.

When leaves are soft enough and
 boiling water turns into yellow-green,

Take them in a bowl of cold water,
 and leave them for at least 12 hours.
 If you like,
 you can change water several times.
 But it seems to me too much of it
 removes flavor of the herb.

After 12 hours, take them in a colander,
 squeeze them (not too much) and
 put them in a food processor.
 If you don’t have the gadget,
 you can chop them with your knife.
 The point is

Cut their fiber as much as possible by mincing them finely.

We can freeze the paste in Ziploc to use it all year round.

When we dry completely boiled Japanese mugwort with sunshine (or microwave; er, this way is popular, actually), and powdered it in a food mill, that’s Yomogui powder we find in high-end food stores. (You can dry leaves without boiling or steaming. But they turn brown as they dry without being cooked.) As the other herbs, dried version has stronger but simpler flavor. I love frozen version. Especially when we bake bread by kneading defrosted Yomogui paste into dough, my kitchen smells very sweet. The bread has strikingly clear color of spring green! For one home-bakery cycle 1 tbsp of paste is enough. Please try. It’s a spring delicacy of Japan. 😄

White and Yomogui versions of bean-paste buns.
 We can find them in any supermarket in Japan.
 Yammy. 😋

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