🍱 Kankoyaki (Drum cakes)

Drum cakes, or kankoyaki, are a food made by packing a wheat-flower dough full of ingredients and then frying and steaming it. They are similar to oyaki dumplings. For the filling, people use local ingredients that match the season, such as edible wild vegetables, adzuki beans, pumpkin, mushrooms, and pickles. Drum cakes are a local dish that has been passed down in the Tsukui area of Sagamihara City since the Edo period. The Tsukui area is mountainous and not suited to growing rice; locals have long cultivated wheat and beans, and the flour-based food culture that took root centers on wheat. During the Edo period, people ate drum cakes for lunch or as a snack, wrapping uruka (the salt-cured intestines of an ayu sweetfish) or miso in dough and then steaming and frying it on the hot ash of a sunken hearth. Some say that kankoyaki, the Japanese name for drum cakes, comes from the fact that the cakes resemble in shape a type of taiko drum (kakko) used in traditional court music.