Mio Tsuchiya - 空気のお菓子 (Air Sweets)

Fluffy and scrumptious
Delicious pastries are
Almost all of them are made of air

The fantasies, preoccupations, and desires of confectionery artist Mio Tsuchiya, who loves sweets more than three meals a day, have been brought together in this book. Marshmallow, meringue, chiffon cake, cotton candy, popcorn, whipped cream. This book introduces eight kinds of airy, fluffy, scrumptious confections that hold a lot of air from three aspects: "look," "story," and "recipe.

Ms. Tsuchiya, who eats all kinds of sweets from all ages (except sponge cakes), was most inspired to focus on air confections because of the value of air.

Air is free. And because it is invisible, the word "air" is never written on the ingredients. However, air, especially in air pastries, produces such a "deliciousness" as an ingredient that it should be written at the top of ingredients in recipes.

The fact that weight is proportional to value is also recognized outside of confectionery. Heavy = packed full. Now, how about applying this to air candy? That was Mr. Tsuchiya's point of view. If you remove the air from sweets that are delicious because they are fluffy and scrumptious, what would happen to their deliciousness? ...... We hope you will try to find the answer in the book.

Let me introduce you to three aspects of the book.

1. Mittate
According to Tsuchiya, "mite" is a very important concept in her work as a confectionary artist, and she has found a new way of expression in his "cineca," which she started alone in 2012, by using a single movie as a single confectionary. In this book, Tsuchiya uses the things in our daily lives as airborne snacks, as she says, "If they were replaced by snacks, we could eat this and that. The bedding on the bed is made of fluffy cotton candy, the cardboard is made of marshmallow foam, and the person reading a book has a chiffon cake pillow around his neck.

2. Monogatari
The eight stories written by Ms. Tsuchiya in the form of essays, each with a lively rhythm, are just the right length to be read over a cup of coffee. The stories include historical figures, familiar sweets, and Tsuchiya's Asakusa neighborhood, mixing the straightforward emotion of a confectionery lover with the sharp perspective of a confectionery writer, and are sure to bring new discoveries to anyone who reads them.

3. Recipes
It has been 10 years since Ms. Tsuchiya started her career as a confectionary artist, but in fact, she has never published a recipe book before. This time, we present recipes for the eight types of air pastries that appear in the first half of this book. The recipes are, of course, characterized by the inclusion of air as an ingredient. This was surely a world first, because only by successfully incorporating air can delicious air candies be made.

Confectionery, which mainly uses refined ingredients, is much more chemical than cooking, both in the way it is made and its structure. Tsuchiya's one-word notes explain confectionery from a chemical point of view, which is a must-see.

This book is probably the first book in the world to write "air" into recipe ingredients. This book is an attempt to create a book that contains all of Ms. Tsuchiya's "delicious points. The foreword to this book contains the following passage:

An ordinary, everyday scene,
If they were replaced by sweets,
I could eat this, that, and the other...
Is it a fantasy, an excessive infatuation, or a wish?
The sweets in the air and the life in the air mix together softly,
The time becomes sweet for a moment.

Air is tasteless, odorless, and free
It is tasteless, odorless, free, and very humble.
Though we are rarely aware of it,
I think that it is the air that has made my day
I sometimes think that it is thanks to the air that we are all able to make it through the day.

Ms. Tsuchiya is always thinking. Can't we make our everyday life, which we have taken for granted for some time, tastier, prettier, and more interesting? This book presents a question to those of us who believe in the "ordinary" in our daily lives, using the sweets of the air as a starting point.

Text by Ema Otobe

Editor: Ema Otobe
Designer: Haruka Fujii
Creative direction: Osamu Kushida
Photo: Koji Honda

2023
148 × 210 × 8 mm
56 pages
Japanese
Hardcover
2500 copies
ISBN: 978-4-910462-14-1

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© Fragile Books