Oyaki

The agriculture ministry's regional food page describes the dough as wheat or buckwheat flour mixed with water, rolled thin and wrapped round a filling. Rice was hard to grow in Nagano's cold mountains, so wheat and buckwheat filled the gap, and oyaki stood in for a rice meal. The ministry traces the dish to the Nishiyama area of Kamiminochi District. It also notes that grain dough cooked the same way has turned up at a Jomon site in Ogawa Village.

Cooks steam oyaki, bake them, or do one and then the other. Baking dries the skin to a crisp shell and steaming leaves it soft and chewy. The old Nishiyama way was to sear each one on an iron pan called a horoku and then bury it in the hot ash of the irori hearth, brushing off the ash before eating. On the Azumi plain a rice and wheat version filled with brown sugar and miso goes by yakimochi, and Iiyama makes chanoko with mugwort in early spring.

Fillings follow the season: eggplant, mushrooms, pumpkin and dried daikon seasoned with miso or soy sauce, with nozawana pickle in winter. In the Hokushin area families make oyaki on 1 August, the day graves are cleaned, and offer them at the household altar on the morning of 14 August for Obon. Twenty makers formed the Shinshu Oyaki Association in October 2009 to protect the tradition.