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Sekihan (Glutinous Rice Steamed with Red Beans)

Name: Sekihan (Glutinous Rice Steamed with Red Beans)
Prep time: 30 min
Cook time: 1 h 15 min
Total time: 1 h 45 min
Yield: 4 servings
Cuisine: Japanese
Ingredients: 540 g glutinous rice; 60 g azuki beans; 800 ml water; 1 tbsp black sesame seeds; 1 tsp salt

Japan's celebration rice: glutinous rice soaked overnight in the water the azuki were cooked in, so it takes their colour, then steamed with the beans. The beans go in unsoaked, because the longer azuki soak the more of them split as they cook. Eaten with sesame salt.

Ingredients

4servings

Steps

Rinse the azuki and, without soaking them, put them in a pot with the 800ml water and bring to the boil.
Lower the heat and simmer until the beans are just short of crushing under a finger and still firm. Stop before the skins split.
⏲ 30 min
Strain, keeping the beans and the cooking water separately. Do not pour the water away. Let it cool.
Wash the glutinous rice and soak it overnight in the cooled bean water. It turns pink.
Drain the rice, saving the bean water again. Mix the rice and beans and spread them in a steamer lined with a damp cloth.
Steam over boiling water. Twice along the way, sprinkle the saved bean water evenly over the rice by hand.
⏲ 40 min
Mix the black sesame with the salt. Serve the rice in bowls, scattered with the sesame salt.

Variations

With cowpeas. In the Kanto region, sasage (cowpeas), whose skins rarely split, are often used instead of azuki.
Amanatto sekihan. Hokkaido and Yamanashi use sweet candied beans, folded in after steaming because they dissolve if cooked with the rice.
In a rice cooker. Cook the glutinous rice in the bean water in a rice cooker. It comes out softer than steamed.
Sweet sekihan. Southern Akita makes it with a lot of sugar.

Tips

Do not soak the azuki. The longer they soak, the more of them split as they cook.
Take the beans off a little underdone. They cook again in the steamer.
Keep the bean water. That is the colour.
Soak the rice overnight. The colour and the water go in together.
Sprinkle with bean water while steaming. Glutinous rice is not boiled, so the water has to be added.
Use the sesame as it is. In Japan toasting or cutting it is thought unlucky.

More detail and the reasons why (2)

Azuki have a ceiling on their soak. Soaking gives azuki 6-8 hours, and that figure is a floor for even cooking. Japanese Wikipedia adds the other number: the longer azuki soak, the more readily they split during cooking. A split bean was thought wrong for a celebration, and samurai households used tough-skinned cowpeas instead. So this rice cooks its beans unsoaked and moves them to the steamer while still a little firm.
The colour is in the cooking water. It is the same rule waakye gives for its leaf liquor, except that here the bean itself is the dye. Its colour moves into the water and the glutinous rice drinks that water up. That is why the rice soaks in it overnight and is sprinkled with it again while it steams (steaming). The soak putting the water into the grain before any heat is the same thing suman relies on.