A surprising new way to enjoy green tea ice cream.

Recently, our reporter Udonko was scrolling through Instagram when one image stopped her in her tracks. The caption accompanying the photo told her that what she was seeing was “surprisingly delicious”, but in her opinion it was anything but.

Still, the post came from Meiji, one of  her favourite ice cream makers, so she decided to give it a chance, and strangely, the more she looked at it, the more she realised they might just be on to something.

So she gathered the ingredients for the recipe included with the photo, and prepped her kitchen to make…Matcha Ice Cream Takikomigohan.

Takikomigohan is seasoned rice cooked with a variety of ingredients, and it’s an easy dish to make in the rice cooker. It’s usually made with vegetables and sometimes meat as well, but this was the first time she’d ever thought to add ice cream to the mix, so it stood out on her ingredients list, which reads as follows:

Ingredients (3 Servings)

・1 Super Cup matcha ice cream (200 millilitres [6.8 ounces])
・3 cups rice
・Water (550 millilitres)
・1 onion
・4 sausages
・Shimeji mushrooms (1/2 pack)
・Cooking sake (1 tablespoon)
・Consommé soup (2 teaspoons)
・Salt (1.5 teaspoons)
・Finely chopped green onions, to taste

Udonko lives on her own so she halved the amounts listed above to make it better suited to a solo meal. Plus, she still wasn’t 100-percent sure she would like the unusual meal so she didn’t want anything to go to waste.

The steps to making the meal are nice and simple — chop the onions into quarters, slice the sausage into one-centimetre pieces and separate the mushrooms. Then pop the rice in the rice cooker with the appropriate amount of water.

Add cooking sake, consommé, and salt to the rice and water and mix.

Place the onion on the centre of the rice and scatter the sausages and shimeji mushrooms around it…

▼ Then, it’s time for the pièce de résistance…the matcha ice cream!

Once you’ve scooped dollops of ice cream around the mix, it’s time to close the lid and set the rice to cook.

The sight of the green ice cream in her rice cooker looked very odd, but it was too late to back out now so she said a prayer to the rice cooker gods for the best outcome. Once the cooking was done, about an hour later, she lifted the lid cautiously and found…

▼ …it was still green!

The matcha ice cream had soaked into the mixture, turning the white rice into a pale green colour that actually looked quite beautiful. All that was left to do now was to mix everything together and serve it up.

▼ Top with as much or as little green onions as you like.

The time had finally come to taste the mixture, and as she looked at the steaming green rice in front of her, she put her trust in Meiji’s “surprisingly delicious” claim and raised a portion of it to her mouth.

▼ It was…surprisingly delicious!

As it turns out, Meiji wasn’t lying with their bold claim — the dish was incredibly tasty, with the ice cream imparting a smooth, creamy texture to the mix. The bitterness and flavour of the matcha, which is usually really pronounced when you eat a regular Super Cup, had almost disappeared, so it didn’t interfere with the other ingredients as much as Udonko thought it might.

The ice cream played a mellow tune in the background as the consommé took centre stage, creating an exquisite Western-style flavour. Its complex saltiness enhanced the sweetness of the rice and brought everything together in a harmonious blend that was reminiscent of pilaf.

▼ Like a pilaf she’d never tried before.

The meal tasted so good that Udonko finished it all in no time — in fact, she kind of wished she’d stuck to the original serving size so she could enjoy some leftovers.

▼ She should never have doubted Meiji’s Instagram post about the recipe.

So if you’ve ever wanted to get creative with your matcha ice cream, this is the recipe to do it with. It might look shocking at first, but the rice cooker gods will wave their magic wands over the mix to transform it into a surprisingly delicious meal. And it’s a thousand times better than cooking beer and potato chips together in a rice cooker.

Photos © SoraNews24
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