{"id":1320,"date":"2025-07-01T18:00:12","date_gmt":"2025-07-02T01:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/?p=1320"},"modified":"2025-07-01T18:00:12","modified_gmt":"2025-07-02T01:00:12","slug":"donuts-with-seaweed-and-soy-sauce-is-japans-mister-donut-idea-too-japanese-for-its-own-good","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/?p=1320","title":{"rendered":"Donuts with seaweed and soy sauce \u2014 Is Japan\u2019s Mister Donut idea too Japanese for its own good?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

Traditional mochi treatment puts a spin on the Pon de Ring, but is it an unrecoverable tailspin?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

Mister Donut<\/strong> is the<\/em> Japanese donut chain. Though it originally started out in the U.S., it\u2019s risen to greater success in Japan than it ever did in its home country, and was pretty much Japan\u2019s only high-profile donut chain for several decades. Even now, with Krispy Kreme<\/a> and Randy\u2019s Donuts<\/a> having opened locations in Japan, there\u2019s still a perception that Mister Donut is the one that\u2019s really tapped into Japanese sweets fans\u2019 tastes.<\/p>\n

But a recent suggestion from Mister Donut had even us thinking that maybe it had gotten a little too Japanese<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

First, let\u2019s set the stage\/dessert table. On its official website, Mister Donut has a list of what it calls \u201cat-home donut arrangements.\u201d<\/strong> They\u2019re basically mini recipes for ways to spruce up our Mister Donut treats once you get them home<\/strong>, 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.<\/p>\n

And then there\u2019s this suggestion<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Yes, that\u2019s a Mister Donut donut wrapped in seaweed<\/strong>. Why? Because this is their arrangement for Pon de Isobemaki<\/strong>, which will require some quick linguistic side dishes to explain.<\/p>\n

First, Pon de Ring<\/strong> is Mister Donut\u2019s most popular donut, a ring made up of bite-sized spheres of dough.<\/p>\n

\u25bc 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\u2019t make smoke come out of your ears.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Meanwhile isobemaki<\/strong> is a traditional Japanese dish in which a mochi<\/strong> rice cake is grilled, dipped in dashi soy sauce<\/strong> (soy sauce with bonito stock), and wrapped in a sheet of dried seaweed (or nori, as it\u2019s called in Japanese),<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a not entirely uncommon misconception that Pon de Ring is made with mochi flour, since they\u2019re chewier than other donuts. However, this extra chewiness actually comes from tapioca powder that\u2019s mixed into the dough. There\u2019s no mochi in Pon de Ring, which means there\u2019s 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\u2019d get if you were looking for a way to justify eating some dessert when you haven\u2019t even had dinner yet.<\/p>\n

If the suggestion was coming from anywhere else, we\u2019d be tempted to dismiss it immediately, but this recipe is straight from Mister Donut themselves, and it wouldn\u2019t 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<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

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\u2019s the glazed Pon de Ring and the non-glazed Pon de Ring Plain. However, since Mister Donut\u2019s Pon de Isobemaki recipe just says to use a \u201cPon de Ring,\u201d we went with the style simply called Pon de Ring, the glazed version.<\/p>\n

The first step of the recipe is to heat the Pon de Ring in the microwave for 15 seconds<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Next, dip the donut in dashi soy sauce<\/strong>, making sure to get the condiment on both sides. Mister Donut\u2019s recipe calls for roughly 30 milliliters (approximately one ounce) of sauce, but you probably don\u2019t really need to be too precise with the measurement.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

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\u2019s explicit permission to do so, but if a parent said \u201cGo ahead, slap my kid in the face,\u201d that still wouldn\u2019t make it something we could do without it weighing heavily on our conscience.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Once the dipping is done, grab a sheet of nori and wrap the donut in it<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

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\u2019t slide free from its seaweed sheath, but not so tightly as to smoosh our sweets.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Then we lifted the Pon de Osobemaki up, took a bite, and\u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\u2026were startled by how delicious it is!<\/strong><\/p>\n

For as bizarre as the concept had sounded, there\u2019s very little in the way of distracting drama once you taste it<\/strong>. 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.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Despite its name, the Pon de Isobemaki actually reminded us more of another traditional Japanese food: mitarashi dango<\/strong>. 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\u2019s probably why Mister Donut\u2019s recipe ostensibly wants you to use the glazed version of the donut.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Reference: Mister Donut<\/a><\/em>
\nTop image: SoraNews24<\/em>
\nInsert images: SoraNews24, Mister Donut<\/a><\/em>
\n\u25cf Want to hear about SoraNews24\u2019s latest articles as soon as they\u2019re published? Follow us on Facebook<\/a> and Twitter<\/a>!<\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"initial","rop_publish_now_accounts":[],"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1320","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-rss"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1320","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1320"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1320\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1320"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1320"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1320"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}