Traditional mochi treatment puts a spin on the Pon de Ring, but is it an unrecoverable tailspin?

Mister Donut is the Japanese donut chain. Though it originally started out in the U.S., it’s risen to greater success in Japan than it ever did in its home country, and was pretty much Japan’s only high-profile donut chain for several decades. Even now, with Krispy Kreme and Randy’s Donuts having opened locations in Japan, there’s still a perception that Mister Donut is the one that’s really tapped into Japanese sweets fans’ tastes.

But a recent suggestion from Mister Donut had even us thinking that maybe it had gotten a little too Japanese.

First, let’s set the stage/dessert table. On its official website, Mister Donut has a list of what it calls “at-home donut arrangements.” They’re basically mini recipes for ways to spruce up our Mister Donut treats once you get them home, things like cutting an Old Fashioned into slices and serving it in a dish with ice cream as a donut parfait, or adding whipped cream and banana slices to turn your donut into a fancy high-tea kind of snack.

And then there’s this suggestion.

Yes, that’s a Mister Donut donut wrapped in seaweed. Why? Because this is their arrangement for Pon de Isobemaki, which will require some quick linguistic side dishes to explain.

First, Pon de Ring is Mister Donut’s most popular donut, a ring made up of bite-sized spheres of dough.

▼ You could say that the Pon de Ring is a chain of donut holes that forms a donut with a single non-donut-hole hole in its center, if that sort of word wrangling doesn’t make smoke come out of your ears.

Meanwhile isobemaki is a traditional Japanese dish in which a mochi rice cake is grilled, dipped in dashi soy sauce (soy sauce with bonito stock), and wrapped in a sheet of dried seaweed (or nori, as it’s called in Japanese),

It’s a not entirely uncommon misconception that Pon de Ring is made with mochi flour, since they’re chewier than other donuts. However, this extra chewiness actually comes from tapioca powder that’s mixed into the dough. There’s no mochi in Pon de Ring, which means there’s also no culinary precedent for dipping a Pon de Ring in soy sauce and then wrapping it in some crisp seaweed. Honestly, it sounds like the sort of insane idea you’d get if you were looking for a way to justify eating some dessert when you haven’t even had dinner yet.

If the suggestion was coming from anywhere else, we’d be tempted to dismiss it immediately, but this recipe is straight from Mister Donut themselves, and it wouldn’t be in their interest to present us with a way to make one of their products taste worse, right? So we headed out to our local branch, though still with our hearts full of more confusion than hope, to pick up a Pon de Ring and give this highly unorthodox idea a try.

Almost immediately, we ran into a hiccup, because Mister Donut sells multiple kinds of Pon de Ring, At the most basic stage of division, there’s the glazed Pon de Ring and the non-glazed Pon de Ring Plain. However, since Mister Donut’s Pon de Isobemaki recipe just says to use a “Pon de Ring,” we went with the style simply called Pon de Ring, the glazed version.

The first step of the recipe is to heat the Pon de Ring in the microwave for 15 seconds.

Next, dip the donut in dashi soy sauce, making sure to get the condiment on both sides. Mister Donut’s recipe calls for roughly 30 milliliters (approximately one ounce) of sauce, but you probably don’t really need to be too precise with the measurement.

We honestly felt a little guilty doing this to one of the absolute all-stars of the Japanese sweets scene. Sure, we had Mister Donut’s explicit permission to do so, but if a parent said “Go ahead, slap my kid in the face,” that still wouldn’t make it something we could do without it weighing heavily on our conscience.

Once the dipping is done, grab a sheet of nori and wrap the donut in it.

Its time in the microwave had made our Pon de Ring a little droopy in consistency, so we had to use a delicate touch to make sure we were gripping tightly enough so that it wouldn’t slide free from its seaweed sheath, but not so tightly as to smoosh our sweets.

Then we lifted the Pon de Osobemaki up, took a bite, and…

…were startled by how delicious it is!

For as bizarre as the concept had sounded, there’s very little in the way of distracting drama once you taste it. The sweet and salty notes of the donut, glaze, and soy sauce prove that they can in fact play very nicely together, and while the texture of the nori is a bit discordant, its slightly salty contribution to the flavor profile makes for nice clean finish.

Despite its name, the Pon de Isobemaki actually reminded us more of another traditional Japanese food: mitarashi dango. These dumplings, which actually are made from mochi, are brushed with a glaze made from sugar, mirin (sweet cooking sake), and soy sauce, producing a flavor that dances gracefully on the sweet-savory line. When the glaze on the standard Pon de Ring meets soy sauce, it creates a similar sensation, and that’s probably why Mister Donut’s recipe ostensibly wants you to use the glazed version of the donut.

Getting back to isobemaki itself, though, the flavor tends to be different depending on whether you eat it in the Tokyo or Osaka area, since Osaka favors a sweeter-tasting soy sauce than east Japan does. That has us thinking that maybe the non-glazed Pon de Ring Plain has potential with the isobemaki-style treatment too, so we might have to experiment with that as well, provided that we can resist the urge to just repeat the very satisfying as-is recipe from Mister Donut.

Reference: Mister Donut
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Insert images: SoraNews24, Mister Donut
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