And of course, they’ll only be around for a limited time!

Around this time every year for the last five years, branches of the Japanese burger chain Mos Burger in Shizuoka Prefecture have teamed up with a local TV show called Marugoto to bring special limited-edition burgers featuring local Shizuoka ingredients. In previous years the recipes used grilled Satsuma mandarins and freshly fished whitebait and horse mackerel, but this year they’ve opted to use aojiro miso.

Aojiro miso is a miso, or fermented soybean paste, that’s unique to Shizuoka, dating back 300 years to the Sengoku period. When members of the nobility moved from the capital of Kyoto to Suruga (present-day central Shizuoka), they clamored for a way to replicate Kyoto’s delicious white miso, and aojiro miso was the result.

With a flavor that combines the sweet and lightly salted flavor of Kyoto-style white miso with the dark and pungent countryside-style miso, it has a mild briny taste that really allows you to enjoy the flavor of the soybeans. The two new Shizuoka-limited Mos Burger sandwiches use aojiro miso made by Kanjyu Foods, the sole producer of aojiro miso in the prefecture who has been making it since the Edo period.

For the sandwiches, Kanjyu’s aojiro miso is made into a sauce with locally grown shiitake mushrooms and spicy gochujang (Korean red chili paste) and soaked into a thick, deep-fried pork cutlet to make up Mos Burger’s new Aojiro Miso Roast Katsu Meat Miso Sauce Burger. The burger comes with green leaf lettuce and either a slice of tomato or a fried egg.

The addition of the tomato is meant to tone down the spice of the sauce, while the egg pairs well with it. However, while the tomato version is available all day, the egg version is only available after 4:50 p.m., to coincide with the broadcast time of Marugoto. Both burgers sell for 490 yen (US$3.63).

In addition to the two burgers, a special favorite has returned to the menu: the Mixable Shake Mikkabi Mandarin (400 yen for medium, 320 yen for small), made with mandarin oranges from the Mikkabi neighborhood of Hamamatsu in Shizuoka. This shake was first released in 2020 in very limited regions and in limited quantities, but it was so popular they brought it back this year.

The delicate balance of sweet and sour of the Mikkabi mandarins has been condensed into a sauce and combined with a vanilla shake, so when you mix it up, you get a delightfully creamy mandarin flavor. You can order this drink alone or with a set for just 110 yen extra.

These three items come in limited quantities but are available now until supplies run out at all 38 branches of Mos Burger in Shizuoka Prefecture, so if you’re interested, why not take a trip to Shizuoka? If you go to the coastal city of Numazu you can also try their Deep Sea Fish Burger, which is only available there. You can go on a culinary journey, just by eating Mos Burger!

Source, images: PR Times
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