(Reed Stevenson points out that manju are typically steamed, not griddled. We’ve ID‘d the cakes as a form of kasutera.)
Kasutera are a type of small cake. In this case, they were filled with red bean paste. Walking around the streets of Hakone, I spotted this decidedly steampunk kasutera maker.
Driven by a single motor hooked up to a bicycle chain, this machine would drop a ring down on the hot griddle and fill it with cake batter, then red bean paste, then more cake batter.
The cake would then rotate for half a turn on the hot griddle until it was flipped. Once the cake made it around and was fully cooked, an operator would lift it off the machine, drop the cake into a box and put the ring back in the machine, where it would crawl up a chain, get dropped back on the griddle and the whole process would start up again.
I watched this thing for about 15 minutes, waiting for it to jam up or otherwise fail. It worked flawlessly. Software developers could take a lesson or two from this machine’s bug-free operation.
(click for a larger pic)
PS - The cakes were tasty.
Posted by pmk at April 26, 2004 3:41 PM | TrackBackFor what it’s worth, my software will run fine for 15 minutes too.
:)
Posted by: George Schlossnagle at April 26, 2004 3:57 PMI should have mentioned that the previous post sent my titty torsion to all-time highs.
Posted by: gluh at April 27, 2004 12:13 AMI once saw a human kasutera machine in Tokyo’s Asakusa neighborhood. He was a 1930-1940 model. The poor guy was standing in the bay window overlooking the sidewalk, like a little monkey on show. He would dip one side of a block of sweet potato paste into the batter and set it on the hot oiled griddle. Once the bottom was golden brown, he would dip another side into the batter and cook it on the griddle. He kept rotating that block until all six sides were done. I was mesmerized by the precision and the sweet smell of carb overload. So much so that I got a block even though I just ordered a cone of soft-serve sweet potato-flavored ice cream. I was double-fisting all the way down the street. The moral of the story: humans do it better than machines, and I like sweet potatoes.
Posted by: Khanh at April 30, 2004 5:58 AM