Chinese culture is rife with culinary superstition. From foods having ‘heaty’ and ‘cooling’ properties, to getting 50 years of guanyinma bad luck from sticking chopsticks straight up in a ricebowl, some of them make sense, but others, not so much.

One such superstition that I’ve never really questioned (until now) is the advice to refrain from eating certain fruits and milk together. The fruits in question range from bananas and oranges, to more niche ones like mangosteens, and of course, today’s ingredient of interest — persimmons!

A month ago, on a two-day layover in Tokyo on the way to Memphis, I had a dessert that blew a gaping hole in this Chinese superstition I’ve long held to be true. It was a persimmon milk kakigori at Kurogi.

The dessert was all kinds of fluffy and creamy, and was as graceful as the Japanese autumn happening all around. It looked the part too, with the ultra-fluffy shaved ice only the Japanese could pull off piled high in a hand-made ceramic bowl, a gleaming wedge of persimmon on top, and a little quivering piece of gold leaf for that extra bit of boujie-ness. As much as I liked persimmons, I did have reservations about the milk part. But all doubt evaporated as I put spoon to mouth, because by god does the combination of fruity persimmon and ice-cloud dairy work; it was like having a cold, milk-flavoured cotton candy with bits of lightly-sweetened, jelly-soft persimmon slices suspended in every other bite. It’s so sensual and autumnal, and totally speaks to the part of you left behind during your infatuated, Winter Sonata-obsessed teenage years.

The real kicker though, was a third ingredient hidden within the kakigori tower — a few sweetened bits of adzuki (red bean). Its almost meaty earthiness grounds the whole dessert, and reinforces the marriage of persimmon and milk even more, like a pastor officiating their wedding. Most importantly though, the dessert did not give me a stomach ache, and that was all the reason I needed to recreate the flavour combination back home in Malaysia.

So, in celebration of the non-existent autumn of the ever scorching hot Malaysia, I took the three flavours — persimmon, milk, and red bean — and whipped up a tribute dessert of sorts: a milk panna cotta with roasted persimmons, a red bean kakigori-esque granita, and a spiced syrup for a bit of drizzle action.

It sounds like a heck of a lot of work, until you actually get to it. The panna cotta can be whipped up in 10 minutes and forgotten in the fridge until the next day, the persimmons can be left to roast in the oven until you need it, and the syrup is just a byproduct of the persimmon roasting process. So the only mildly annoying part is scraping the red bean ice. But if anything, just like a marriage isn’t quite complete without a pastor or wedding officiator, this dessert would fall short of its true autumnal high without the addition of adzuki.

Aside: Thank you Flory for bringing me around Tokyo! If you’re ever planning on going to Japan, check out some of her walking guides and eating recommendations. Or book her for a tour! She’ll bring you traipsing around the back-alleys of Ginza in search of fox shrines, find little kissatens across the city, and show you funky, silly doors (called Thomassons) wherever you go. Oh, and her writing is waaaay more entertaining and awe-inspiring than mine, so sign up for her newsletter!