Matcha-misu: the Tiramisu That Keeps Its Coffee

Our menu line is short: matcha-misu — sakari matcha sake, 100% arabica coffee, hazelnut feuilletine. Three ingredients, and the second one is the one most versions of this dessert quietly delete.

Almost every matcha tiramisu you will meet swaps the coffee out for more matcha. Ours does not. That single decision is what this post is about, and it turns out to be the difference between a colour change and a recipe.

Tiramisu is a construction, not a recipe

Strip a tiramisu down and there are three load-bearing parts. A sponge soaked in a bitter liquid. A fat-rich, barely sweet cream. A bitter dust on top. Everything else — which sponge, which liqueur, whether there is egg in the cream — is variable, and the arguments about it have been running in Italy since the dish appeared. It is usually traced to the Veneto some time in the 1960s or 1970s, with more than one restaurant claiming to have got there first.

What that means practically is that you can swap the bitters and the dish survives, but you cannot swap the structure. Take out the soak and it is a cake. Take out the bitterness and it is a trifle. Which is why the honest way to build a matcha version is to ask what matcha is for in the structure, not what colour it makes things.

Two bitternesses that behave differently

Keeping the coffee means the dessert carries two bitter agents, and they are not the same kind of bitter.

Coffee’s bitterness is made in the roaster. It comes out of high-temperature browning, it is carried by volatile aromatics, and it hits fast and fades — that is why coffee smells of more than it tastes of. Matcha’s bitterness comes from compounds that were in the leaf before anything was heated: catechins, plus a set of amino acids that give it a savoury, almost broth-like undertow. It arrives more slowly and it stays longer.

Put both in one spoonful and they do not cancel, they stack in sequence. The coffee is the top note and the matcha is the finish. A version that dropped the coffee would have a long finish and no opening, which is the exact complaint people have about most matcha desserts without quite being able to name it.

Why good matcha tastes savoury rather than just bitter

Matcha is made from tea that is shaded for several weeks before it is picked. Shading the plants changes what the leaf builds: less of the compounds that develop under strong sun, more chlorophyll, and more of the amino acids that give matcha its umami edge. That is why the good stuff reads as creamy and savoury with a bitter frame rather than as a mouthful of bitterness with a green colour.

It is also why matcha belongs in a dessert that already contains a lot of dairy fat. Savoury and bitter both need fat to sit against, and a tiramisu cream is essentially a fat delivery system.

The sake that turns up three times on one menu

Here is the fact we find genuinely uncommon, and we have looked.

Sakari Matcha Junmai is on our sake list, where our own wine list describes it as a “junmai & matcha fusion” with an “earthy, creamy, bittersweet harmony”. Junmai means the sake is made from rice, water, koji and yeast with no added distilled alcohol. That same bottle is the soaking liquid in this dessert. And it is the base of our Matcha Milk cocktail, which the drinks menu builds from matcha sake, butterscotch, hazelnut and cream liqueur and describes, accurately, as a matcha latte with alcohol in it.

One bottle, three places on one menu: a drink you can order neat, a dessert, and a cocktail. Most restaurants that pour an unusual bottle use it in one place. Notice too that the cocktail and the dessert share a second ingredient — hazelnut — which is not a coincidence so much as an admission that the pairing works.

The alcohol is doing two jobs

A classical tiramisu carries a fortified wine or a liqueur in the soak, and its job is aroma: alcohol is volatile, so it lifts the smell of everything it is mixed with. That is one job.

Here the alcohol is also the matcha carrier. The soak is not coffee plus a separate splash of something green — the matcha is already in the bottle. So the ingredient that lifts the aroma and the ingredient that supplies the second bitterness are the same ingredient, which is a tighter piece of construction than adding matcha powder to a mascarpone and calling it done.

Feuilletine, and a small note about leaves

Feuilletine is crushed crêpe dentelle — a very thin, lacy French biscuit, broken into shards and folded into pastry work wherever a layer needs to crunch without being a base. Hazelnut feuilletine adds fat and toast to the crunch, which puts it in the same browned family as the coffee.

The word is worth a second: feuille is French for leaf, and it turns up all over pastry for anything built in thin layers. It is the same root as the feuille de brik in our spanakopita, which our own menu misspells and which we wrote about rather than quietly fixing. Two leaves, two textures, opposite ends of the menu.

What to drink with it, and what is in it

The obvious move is to order the Sakari alongside and taste the dessert against its own soak. The other one on our list that our wine list flags for dessert is the Hideyoshi Lachamte sparkling sake, described there as bubbly, peachy and “perfect with dessert”. Both are on the menu.

Honest contents, because this one has more in it than a dessert usually does: it contains alcohol, caffeine from two sources — coffee and matcha both — dairy, and hazelnut. If any of those are a problem, the muhallebi still contains kirsch and dairy, and the chocolate kataifi tart is dairy and gluten. Tell the floor before you order rather than after.

Where it sits in a meal

Matcha-misu is the dessert for the table that has been drinking. It is the one that reads as a nightcap rather than as pudding, and it goes better after a spread of small plates than after a big piece of protein — if you have just finished the seabass or the pork, the tart is the heavier and better landing. It is also the one guests photograph, so expect a delay before anyone eats.

The savoury half of this list is where the same thinking started: roasted sesame sauce on the sprouts, kombu dashi in a Moroccan dip. The story of how the two cuisines ended up in one kitchen is in five years of Habibi-san, the cocktails that have no menu at our sibling venue are here, and the room is in the gallery.

We are at 29 Hamilton Road, Singapore 209198, Tuesday to Sunday from 5pm, with brunch on Saturday and Sunday from 11am to 2.30pm. Book a table.