- [Narrator] This episode
is sponsored by Squarespace. I used Squarespace to build
both "Basics With Babish" and BingingWithBabish.com. On the sites, you'll find
recipes, equipment lists, other news and updates,
all beautifully designed, if I do say so myself. Get 10% off your first Squarespace order by visiting SquareSpace.com/Babish. (speaking Japanese) (speaking Japanese) Hello there. Welcome back to another
episode of "Anime with Alvin," where this time we're
gonna be taking a crack at making the premium castella
cake from "Demon Slayer." Castella is a sponge-like cake often served with tea in Japan. It's a simple, yet delicious
dessert with a long shelf life, hence why it's very popular
for souvenirs and snacks. But in my experience, the real ones can be
very difficult to make, which is why some of these premium ones can go upwards of 60
to 80 dollars per cake. So to better understand the standard, we ordered two of them
directly from Japan. The first one in this
beautiful gold wrapping is the Bunmeido Tokusen
Gosan Japanese castella cake. Long name. And the second one was the
Shooken Nagasaki castella cake. So how about an unboxing? Let's start with the Bunmeido one. Oh wow. What a nice, beautiful
wooden box this comes in. I'm a sucker for this kind of packaging, so I'm already starting to like this one. Once you open it, the cake is delicately
enclosed in a sort of paper, cardboard situation. You can tell that has
a very uniform texture. Peeling off the parchment
on the bottom of a slice, you can see these thick sugar crystals, which seems to match the fact that the black specks shown
in the cake in "Demon Slayer" is a result of high quality sugar. It's difficult to do the visual justice. The egg flavor is strong, but delicious. It's sweet, but not too
sweet, and extremely moist. Having eaten a lot of castella in my life, I can definitely tell that this is one of my top three of all time. Let's crack open the second one. This one is from Nagasaki.
Visually, it's very similar. It's slightly shorter than the
other one, in fluffy terms. And upon examining its texture,
it's a little bit more dense and definitely not as airy. Yeah, this one definitely
used a little bit more flour and relies on more of this syrup
and sugar to keep it moist. And doesn't have that
delicious egg yolk aroma when using high quality eggs. However, it is still delicious, and if this was served with tea, I would not complain whatsoever. Now that we know what we're up against, it's time to see if we can make our own. Traditionally, castella is
often baked in wooden molds, not steel. We're gonna improvise a little bit with these two wooden
molds we got from Japan especially designed for castella baking. I'm lining the bottom of a cast iron tray with the parchment paper, adding in two of these
wooden molds right on top and then lining each of these with a piece of parchment paper, folding these over the sides and satisfyingly creasing them to make a nice rectangular shape. And my favorite part, one last sheet of parchment paper that goes right down the middle and makes a satisfying filled shape. Now, for the eggs. Eggs are very, very very
important part of castella making. It's kind of the only
flavoring and seasoning you have in the entire thing. So we chose high-quality eggs and I'm now separating 10
egg yolks and six egg whites. Gosan, which is part of the
Bunmeido castella's name, actually translates to five, three, which is the ratio of
egg yolks to egg whites that make for a good castella. So after we have our 10 egg yolks and our six egg whites separated, I'm whisking together the egg
yolks until they are uniform and make a nice yellow thick paste. The six egg whites go into a stand mixer and I'm mixing them on
medium to medium high speed until they become a meringue. Now I'm adding in 200 grams of sugar and slowly whisking this
at a very high speed until we have very stiff peaks. One way to test that is to
flip the whisk attachment over and make sure that the peaks do not fall. In go all of our egg yolks
directly into our egg whites and with a large, large whisk, I'm slowly whisking this
in an upwards motion to not destroy too many
of the bubbles in here. Now one of the other
things that makes this a premium castella is the sugar used in the actual cake itself. We have here 100 grams of
black sugar from Okinawa, which has more of this raw taste. Think like brown sugar, but definitely a little
bit more grassy, earthy, and slightly more expensive. Since this is raw, we're gonna need to sift this before this can go into our cake batter, which is taking a little bit, 'cause some of these
are just dense crystals that you really gotta
press through the sieve. But once that's done, in
goes 80 grams of syrup. This is just simple syrup
made with sugar and water, and it's supposed to help maintain the moist texture for the cake. The syrup goes in, whisk
until it is smooth, and now in goes 75 grams of bread flour. Whisking and mixing until
this is evenly incorporated, our batter is ready. The final step before pouring our batter is to sprinkle onto the bottom, a generous handful of zarame sugar, a coarse raw crystal-like
sugar that comes from Japan that is apparently used
in certain variations of a premium castella cake, which is what I'm hoping
will be those brown spots we see from the "Demon Slayer" anime. Once the light scattering
has been sprinkled, our batter goes in directly on top, and we now throw this into the oven. This goes into an oven at 350 degrees and this is where the baking
process gets very interesting. After watching a lot of
these castella making videos done in factories or shops in Japan, a step that is commonly done is awa-kiri, or bubble cutting, in which every two minutes after the cake goes into
the oven, it is pulled out, sprayed with water from
a mist bottle on the top and a wooden tool is used
to sort of mix the batter, or stir it so that the
top does not dry out and you do not develop a skin. This is supposed to push
the batter from the top to the bottom and bring
the bottom to the top, ensuring that the batter cooks evenly for another two minutes
before this process is repeated again three times
for a total of four awa-kiri. This is my first time
ever taking a cake out while it is baking during
those initial first minutes. But hey, I trust it. There was a reason why
castella is difficult to make. This is probably one of them. So after doing this four times and realizing that I
probably should have doubled the batter amount, this goes back into the
oven until the top browns. Which took about 25 minutes for us. The next step is to
put a third wooden rack right on top and then
cover with a sealed tray to create a steam chamber that essentially will steam
the cake from the inside. So to speed up the heat, I turned this up to 375 on convection, which actually turned out
to be not a great idea because the air from the convection actually killed a lot of
the steam and blew it out, which caused our cake to sort of sink and deflate a little bit halfway. So I turned off the convection
and just left it in there, which made it a lot better. After this has cooked for
another 20 to 25 minutes with the steam cover on, we are now taking this out and seeing the results of our work. So before we can cut into this, we must remove it from its mold, give it a couple flips over so that it's back on its front side, and give this a nice peel
like it is a brand new TV. Not too shabby. A little dense and not
as tall as it could be. But hey, that's why we
can do this one more time. We're gonna place some parchment
on to help wrap this up. The wrapping process is very important as it traps a lot of the moisture inside. Which I'm guessing is a huge
part in keeping the cake moist. This will rest overnight. The next day has arrived,
and to examine our work, we are peeling back our parchment paper and tasting our cake. Oh, this is not looking like the new TV. We should have definitely
sprayed a little bit of oil on the parchment because
it is sticking to the cake from how moist and juicy it is. But I will eat this part
'cause it is so delicious. This is the best part of the cake. But after trimming off the edges, we must give this a nice little taste. The flavor is shockingly good. The egg flavor is strong,
the sugar is there, and this sweet, chewy,
very dense-like cake that was unintentional is very delicious. It might not be the traditional castella that we're aiming for, but
would I eat this in a heartbeat? Heck, yeah. This thing is so good, I'm definitely bringing this home and eating all of it frozen. But we will do this once more. This time, we are doubling
our entire batter recipe because the first one was not tall enough. So we are doing 20 egg yolks
this time and 12 egg whites, maintaining that five
to three golden ratio. Now, we will just speed through this. So we're making the meringue, adding in double the amount of sugar, which is now 400 grams this
time, and making stiff peaks. After that is done, whisking in 20 whole egg yolks that we have now smoothed into a paste. Following that goes in 200
grams of our Okinawa black sugar folded in with the whisk. And then we are going to
proceed with 160 grams of syrup, whisking that in one more time
and 150 grams of bread flour. I think the first one was
a little bit too floury and too dense. So when doubling the batter recipe, I'm actually keeping the
flour pretty much the same. After our batter is nicely mixed, we are once more
sprinkling our zarame sugar on the bottom of our mold
and then dumping this batter, but now through a sieve to
get rid of any extra bubbles. So thank you to Rachel for
holding this down for me. Once our batter has delicately enrobed all of our little crystal chunks, this goes into the oven,
this time, 325 degrees. And we are repeating the awa-kiri process, spraying the top with the mist,
turning it with the spoon, and doing this for a total of
four times every two minutes on the dot to be precise. Once this is done, we are actually increasing the heat to 375 and turning on the convection
for the browning parts so that we can brown the
top as quick as possible. This only took 15 minutes or so, which is 10 minutes shorter
than our previous attempt. Once the top is brown, I'm
adding in our third wooden rack, putting on our steel tray and
turning off the convection and reducing the heat to 350 degrees for another 25 to 30 minutes that it can steam properly this time. And the results are definitely
a little bit more appealing than the first. Upon removing our cake from the oven and taking off our steel tray, we are greeted with a face bath of steam, which is a very good sign 'cause that didn't really
happen the first time. And our cake is noticeably
taller than its previous sibling. Once our cake is done, we're taking off its little wooden racks and sort of trying to shimmy
this back onto the surface of our table to flip. This time, we are now spraying our parchment paper with a little bit of cooking spray to make sure that it does not stick and doing a lot of flip
flops and flips overs and, oh, this is still hot. That's still hot. Why is this so hot? And look at that. Look at all those brown
spots from the sugar. Almost looks like leopard print. But that's a sign that our rock sugar has sank to the bottom. And after one more flip,
we now get to see the top. That leopard print from earlier has now cooled into a
chewy, sticky, caramelly, crackly sugar crust that is probably some of the best cake snacks I've ever eaten. But once this cools just for a little bit, this gets wrapped up in cling film and we see you again tomorrow. All right, it is now the next day, and it is time to reveal our cake. I'm pleasantly surprised to
see the height is still there. And after taking this off
and cutting off the edges, I can confirm that this looks very good. After doing some trimming and
tasting some of the scraps, I think we're headed
into a really good spot. So after cutting this into nice slices and slicing those up, I present to you our attempt
at the premium castella cake from "Demon Slayer." It looks not so bad,
but how does it taste? I rarely say this, but this might be one of
the best things I have made in collaboration with the team, of course. And I'm not saying this because this is mind
blowingly new or crazy. I'm saying it because
after knowing the standard and having eaten a lot of castella and finally being able to
reproduce something similar at home, that's one of the best
feelings in the world. Our version is even moister and fluffier than the other two that we bought. It's almost juicy, like a juicy cake. The egg aroma is there,
the sweetness is perfect. It's not dense at all,
and it's highly addictive. To be fair, we did not have to package
this and ship this overseas, which is probably why it
tastes a little bit better. But I am proud of this. And I would easily
serve this to my friends if they came over for tea. And the coolest part to me is that there's no oil or
butter in this cake batter. There is no leavening agent. It is all just eggs, egg whites, a little bit of flour,
sugar, and a lot of patience. Simple, but beautiful at the same time. Something that I like very much. Thanks again to Squarespace
for sponsoring today's episode. They've been a great partner in supporting the Babish Culinary Universe and bringing my websites to life. From websites to online stores,
to domains and analytics, Squarespace is the all-in-one platform for you to build your online presence. They also have SEO tools so
that your site is getting found in search by more people more often. If you wanna try it for yourself, you can start your free trial today by visiting SquareSpace.com/Babish to get 10% off your first purchase. (gentle music)
