Kiritampo Rice Stick

きりたんぽ

Photos by Tohoku Digital Archive

Historical background

Kiritanpo originates from the Hokuroku area in Ōdate City in Akita Prefecture. In the old times, Kiritanpo was a meal of hunters and woodcutters because it was portable and pretty easy to make. After farming, they would knead the leftover rice, roll it on a skewer, and put it into the tori-nabe (chicken pot), or add miso paste to them. Regardless of how rich or poor a farmer may be, kiritanpo is an essential part of festivals celebrating the year’s harvest reaped by the farmers. Kiritanpo nabe, a kind of soup often made not just in winter but at New Year’s, the Bon festival, and when a family returns home, originates in Ōdate, a city in northern Akita Prefecture. The soup stock is from hinai-jidori chicken, a local specialty.

Characteristics

Kiritanpo is a traditional food in Akita Prefecture which consists of half-smashed rice pounded into a cylindrical shape and toasted on the fire. In Akita Prefecture, locals mash the rice with a pestle and squeeze it into a stick, then, they will bake it. Locals usually place kiritanpo in a hotpot with chicken, green onions, Japanese parsley, and mushrooms, but they also grill kiritanpo over the fire together with miso. You can also eat miso as “miso-yaki tanpo”, but the most famous one is the kiritanpo hotpot. The origin of kiritanpo was to apply miso to the tanpo.

How to make it from scratch

This dish is usually cooked at home, and there are different variations of recipes for kiritanpo. The first step is to prepare the rice: the rice should be hard-cooked before being transferred into a mortar, where it’s mashed. The next step is to wrap the mashed rice around the cedar sticks. Half a centimeter to one centimeter of thickness should be perfect. It’s important to mash it properly, otherwise, the rice will crumble from the sticks. The final step is to add some toppings, although this step is optional, the sticks with rice are grilled and optionally topped with miso paste.

The main ingredient of Kiritanpo is rice. It should be the one from the new harvest. The Japanese also add salted water to it later. The next thing that you need is thirty-centimeter long cedar sticks to make this dish. Additionally, miso paste is optional.

Where to eat

Akita Hinaiya

Take an Ou line train from Akita station to Odate station for 2 hours and a Hanawa line from Odate station to Higashi Odate station for 4 minutes. Walk for 10 minutes.

Akita Hinai Jidoriya

Topico 3F, which is directly connected to the Akita station building