One Delicious Year

Is Nothing Sacred?

2009-05-06T22:55:00.004+09:00

You're looking at a can of Sapporo beer, an inexpensive, fairly decent lager.

Now Japanese beers often come in peculiar flavors. One I've seen a lot of lately is ginger beer -- not ginger-beer, but beer with ginger flavoring in it. That's not particularly bad, I suppose, by comparison to such nauseating American products as Pumpkin Cinnamon Beer.

But let's spell out the label here:

フライドチキン: Fu-rai-do Chi-kin
You got it, Fried Chicken Beer.

Fortunately, it turns out to be an ad. "If you're buying this beer at Family Mart, why not pick up some Family Mart fried chicken as well?" Nevertheless, I got a cold feeling in the pit of my stomach when I spotted this. I just had to buy a can, in the interest of science.

I'm actually sort of disappointed, though. I was all prepared to make clever, cutting remarks about the flavor.

Larry the Lox

2009-04-20T21:28:00.006+09:00

You probably know lox, gravlaks, gravlax, gravad laks, etc. There are many versions of this, but they all boil down to the same: fish fillet is cured, then sliced thin and served. As a rule, gravlaks is not smoked, and traditionally lox isn’t either. Smoked salmon is a different thing, and I for one find them remarkably different.

Usually this curing process is done with salmon, because it originated around the North Sea where salmon is (or was) very plentiful and used as a staple protein, and because salmon has enough fat and such that it stores very well if processed. Similar products — cured, smoked, and/or dried salmon — are also traditional among many native communities along the Pacific Northwest where Pacific salmon run.

Provided the fish you use is impeccably fresh, you can cure anything, and it’s easy to do at home. You can also cold-smoke at home, but it’s something of a production. I’m thinking of trying that one of these days, too, but I thought I’d start with the easy one.

The only irritating part about making gravlax is that you have to have two pieces which are pretty close to the same size. Of course, that means there’s an easy solution and a hard one. The hard solution is to go find (or cut) two same-sized pieces. The easy solution is to buy a whole fish, since the two fillets will be pretty much identical, assuming it’s not a totally lopsided fish! Fortunately, whole fish is easy to come by in Japan, and if you choose right, it doesn’t need to be expensive.

Meet Larry

I went to Tavelt, which is pretty much the best supermarket in Kyoto. It’s not as comprehensive or as cool as Nishiki Market, but it’s a lot cheaper and carries all kinds of non-traditional ingredients that you can’t find in Nishiki — things like tortillas, capers, cheese, and anything else you pretty much never see in Japanese cuisines.

After looking around quite a bit, I decided on a whole large aji, or horse mackerel. This is one of my favorite fish, excellent sliced raw, grilled, and just about anything else. I figured this was a good choice, because it’s so versatile, and it’s medium-fatty like salmon. It’s also quite easy to fillet, which is nice. To top it off, aji isn’t expensive.

Here’s Larry, soon to be Larry the Lox:

I’m not sure what Larry weighs, because he and his cousins were sold per piece, but I’d estimate a little more than a kilogram. After filleting and such, Larry the Lox should be a little more than a pound. He cost me $6.

Larry Has A Little Accident

Out comes the deba-bōchō — the standard Japanese filleting knife — plus the fish scaler, cavity broom (I have no idea what these are properly called), and the bone tweezers.

First, Larry had his scales removed. Because Larry is an aji, he also has a hard strip of armor in running in front of his tail, and that had to be cut off. Then a cold bath.

Sorry Larry, off with your head!

Then out come the guts. A little careful work with the knife, and all the blood was loose and exposed.

Larry had another bath and a thorough scrub with the brush, inside and out, and here he is all clean and tidy.

The first fillet is cut from the cavity side, in three or four strokes: cut up to the backbone, then along the backbone shearing through the pinbones, then up to the dorsal fin, which last can take a couple of strokes, depending. I screwed up a bit with the last stroke, because I didn’t expect Larry’s backbone to be so thick. Oh well.

The second fillet is done in reverse. Start at the dorsal side, and cut down to the backbone, then through the pinbones, then down into the cavity and off. Here’s poor old Larry as two fillets, with a couple strips from my screwup down front, and then in the sink you can just see his head and skeleton.

Now the ribcage is still attached to the fillets, so we have to cut those off. Then I run my fingers along the pinbones and pull them out with heavy tweezers. Look how many pinbones he's got!

A good wipe-down, both sides, and Larry was all ready to go.

Larry Gets Loxed

Poor Larry deserved a drink after what I’d done to him, so I rubbed a little gin into his flesh.

I’d made up a standard mix of salt, sugar, and black pepper. The proportions seem to vary rather a lot, but I thought I’d go heavy on salt and light on sugar because aji is very sweet. The fillets got a pretty healthy coating.

On the flesh side of each fillet, I put fresh sansho, a bunch of dill, and some shiso leaves. Sansho is in season right now, dill is traditional in gravlax, and shiso goes well with aji — I also happened to have some on hand.

Then the fillets go together with the herbs on the inside.

After coating Larry in lots more salt mixture, I wrapped him tightly in a couple of layers of plastic wrap. This went in a shallow tray, weighted down with a board and shoved in the fridge to cure.

Every twelve hours or so, I took it out, drained off liquid, rewrapped, and put it back in the fridge turned to the other side. After turning twice, I let Larry sit weighted for another day.

Larry came out,

I wiped him down, and here at last is Larry the Lox.

Larry Comes To Dinner

We've tried Larry two ways thus far, but I've only photographed one.

This is Larry the Lox, thinly sliced, presented with a little sour cream. We had this with crusty pain de campagne.

Now I should say that I was rather worried about Larry. Since doing all the preparation work, I happened to see an old Iron Chef episode where horse mackerel (aji) was the theme ingredient. What the judges kept saying was that aji is well known to have a very strong odor, an intense "fishiness". Salmon, of course, is one of the mildest, un-fishy fish around. So I was concerned that maybe this hadn't been the best fish choice, and we'd have something pretty unpleasant in Larry the Lox.

In fact, the main problem is the sansho I put on there. I did that because I happened to have a bunch: it's inexpensive right now, because it's in season. What's more, Japanese cured fish products with sansho are quite common, so I figured it would be a good idea. The only thing is, it's quite intense, and the flavor has definitely been drawn out here by the curing process. The result is that Larry tastes strongly of sansho.

The texture is a bit dense and chewy, but not excessively so. The flavor, beyond the sansho, is really rather nice if you like fish. Larry is a bit fishy, but not in an unpleasant way. In fact, the strong aji flavor stands up well to the sansho. I think Larry might go over rather well here in Japan, but maybe not so much at home in the States, where sansho is not a familiar flavor.

The first tasting, with sour cream and bread, was successful. The cream is excellent with Larry.

For my second tasting, because Larry is so strong-flavored, I decided to use some Boursin cheese to stand up to him: a lot like cream or cream cheese, but with a strong garlic-herb flavor of its own. I put the pair on several kinds of crackers, and the result was very good -- especially with the more flavorful, slightly "bready" crackers, as opposed to something like water crackers.

Which means, of course, that one of the best things I can imagine doing with Larry is...

put thin slices, cut in bits because of the chewiness, on top of a bagel with fresh chive cream cheese. Original, huh?

So this weekend, I'm going to try it -- frozen bagels only, unfortunately, because the fresh ones I've seen are overpriced and mediocre. I'll post photos: stay tuned for the future adventures of Larry the Lox.

Quickie Carpaccio

2009-04-20T21:19:00.002+09:00

I made sashimi last night and had some extra, so tonight was carpaccio.

Cut fish very thin, and spread in a single layer as evenly and prettily as possible on a plate. Drizzle generously with fine olive oil. Grind fresh black pepper and sprinkle coarse salt. Scatter with something acidic and crunchy; I used capers for one plate and scallion (negi) for the other. Shave a little Parmesan on top, if you like. At the last minute, squeeze on some lemon juice and serve immediately with crusty bread.

It was delicious, albeit my wife's first remark was, "it tastes like fish!" Just my luck -- I married a smart aleck. Still, I am rather proud that I made these two plates without going shopping. This is technically leftovers.

Argh Argh Argh (An Especially Articulate Post)

2009-04-16T15:41:00.005+09:00

Today I had a most aggravating foodie day. What made it so aggravating was that I’d planned in advance with some care.

First, I looked up when Passover ends, and read Wednesday. Which, of course, I took to mean sundown on Wednesday. So I made this whole plan to eat bread products and stuff on Thursday. Actually, though, it ends sundown Thursday. Not that I’m what anyone would call observant, since I eat shellfish and pork and mix milk with meat and all that. But it’s nice to make some effort once a year. Anyway, that’s one screw-up, which is my own. After that I take no blame.

Skimming one of my favorite Kyoto websites, Kyoto Foodie, I found a bunch of places in fair proximity to one another that are also easily accessible from Sam’s school. Since Sam only has half days at the moment — another annoying thing — I have to pick him up and take him for lunch. Now he adores udon noodles, as well as lots of things anyone would expect a little boy to like, such as ice cream, cake, fruit, and so on. It all clicked....

The Plan

Pick up Sam at 11:40, and catch the #206 bus up to Senbon Imadegawa. Walk a couple of blocks west, and eat at Tawaraya, a famous udon place. Sam can have his usual order — plain (kake) udon noodles with kamaboko fish cake and no sliced scallions. I’ll have the specialty of the house, nihon udon, which is a bowl with just two gigantic (in all directions) noodles. Sounds like an interesting thing to try, and the Kyoto Foodie was fairly positive about it.

Next, walk a couple of blocks due east, ending just south of Senbon Imadegawa, and eat dessert at Chibeta. This is a super-fancy ice cream shop, and so far as my various contacts have learned, it’s about the only really good one, with their own homemade ice cream and sherbet in both classic flavors and their special inventions.

Next, walk a couple blocks more, basically northeast, ending at Le Petit Mec, which two completely unconnected foodie contacts assure me makes the best bread in Kyoto. Buy a fancy loaf to eat with dinner, and if Sam is interested he can have a sweet bread of some kind.

Go home, get him changed, and then play in the park until Mommy gets home.

That was the plan.

The Reality

Picked up Sam, found that he was wearing his exercise pants, but I carefully avoided asking him why: it means he wet his pants, and discussing that leads nowhere good in the short run. As we walked to the bus stop, I explained the plan, and he was amenable.

On the bus, he told me he didn’t want udon. He wanted hamburgers instead. Uh oh. We discussed it, and he decided udon would be okay after all. Whew! The plan was still clicking.

From Senbon Imadegawa, we walked to Tawaraya, which was just where the map indicated. There was something of a crush: apparently a school tour group was having lunch there. Fortunately, noodle places have quick turnover, and high school kids eat fast. We sat and waited, Sam was very good, and we got seated pretty soon. I ordered the specialty:

But this isn’t my photo. Why not?

Sorry, no nihon udon, says the guy. Eh? The specialty dish? It’s also not on the menu, which I find odd. My Japanese is too rudimentary to be sure whether they were sold out or have stopped making it, but in any event I wasn’t going to have it for lunch. Fine. I ordered cold udon with tempura for me, and for Sam the usual: plain hot udon in soup, with no scallion. No problem.

We wait. They serve the table next to us, which ordered after us. I sort of cock an eyebrow, and it becomes clear that our order has been missed. No biggie, these things happen, and fortunately Sam was behaving himself reasonably well. Our food finally arrives... and there’s scallions on Sam’s noodles. Argh! I’m not sending it back, no way. Instead, I pick every one off. Fortunately again, Sam just waits patiently, then eats without complaint.

Results: Frankly, I wasn’t very impressed. The udon place across the street from our house, where they know Sam and give him extra kamaboko (and would never, never give him scallion), is better, and definitely less crowded. When I paid the bill, I also found that Tawaraya is overpriced, albeit udon is never terribly expensive so it wasn’t a big deal. But ten-zaru udon (what I got) shouldn't cost $14, and $6 is steep for plain kake udon. I also noticed that the guy hadn’t written anything on the slip about no scallions on Sam’s noodles, which explains a lot. I still want to try the nihon udon some time, but I’m not nearly as sanguine about it now.

Okay, so now we hike to the ice cream shop. Doesn’t this stuff look delicious?

This isn’t my photo either, though. Because...

It’s closed.

You have to be kidding me. I could swear I looked it up and it isn’t supposed to be closed. There’s a workman’s ladder behind the main window. Maybe they’re closed for renovation or something? Anyway, no ice cream.

Sam was definitely annoyed about this. He mostly got over it when I made it clear that I was at least as annoyed as he was, but after all this walking and no ice cream, his fuse was clearly getting a bit short. I mean, he's not quite four yet, fair enough. So we went looking for other things, heading generally toward Le Petit Mec in hopes of salvaging things a bit — besides, they might have good cake or something.

No luck. The first coffee shop place we passed had a vast selection of coffee-flavored sweets and nothing else. The next was closed. Sam was getting tired of walking and walking, so we took the bus two stops, just past Le Petit Mec, with its beautiful bread...

Which was closed. You have GOT to be kidding me!

Fortunately we were still on the bus as we passed it, so we just didn’t get off until Horikawa, where there’s a fancy patisserie near the corner. We go in there, and Sam picks out a fruit thing that looks to me like he’s not going to like it. I ask him which I should have, and he picks a chocolate thing. I get both. But then it turns out that you can’t eat it there unless you get the cake-plus-drink set, which costs $6.50. Argh. I get ice coffee and milk, and we sit down.

Sam eats the fruit, but doesn’t like the custard, so he eats my chocolate thing. As it turns out, I don’t like the custard either, which tastes like it’s pure egg yolks and has a peculiar citrus flavor that I don’t think goes at all well with it. Heavy and sour, in short. I realize this is how they intend it to be, but I don’t like it. Ah well.

We head home, Sam dozes off on the bus and insists on being carried from the bus stop to the house, so my back starts hurting. Then he refuses to go the park and demands to watch Wall-E on TV instead. After this sequence of failures, I figure the park is probably in flames anyway, so what the heck, turn on the flick.

Aftermath

Then I check some websites.

Chibeta ice cream, closed Mondays. Why is it closed today? No idea.

Le Petit Mec bakery, closed... can that be right? It’s closed Monday through Thursday? How can they possibly run a business like that, weekends only? Weird.

Final tally: $33 for two servings of so-so udon and fancy but (to my taste) not great cake, getting and eating which took a total of about three hours.

Argh argh argh!

Gefilte Fish Again, But Maybe Not So Jewish

2009-04-14T20:19:00.006+09:00

After the Great Gefilte Fish Fiesta, we ended up with a lot of strong fish stock and two large gefilte fish balls. So it was time to cook with leftovers. This was a while back, just after the original gefilte fish thing, but I lost track of the photos, so this took a while to post.

The thing is, the Japanese don’t usually make stock in our sense of the word. Dashi, the basis of just about all Japanese cooked food, is made by extracting flavor from kombu (kelp) and often some sort of dried and salted fish product, most commonly katsuo bushi (salted, smoked, dried bonito in shavings). Taking bones and meat scraps and simmering them with some vegetables for a while is a similar process, but it doesn’t come up almost at all in Japanese cooking. That’s one of the ways you know ramen noodles are Chinese, not Japanese, in origin: the soup is stock, not dashi. So here’s me in Kyoto with a couple of quarts of great fish stock. What to do?

My first thought was one of those great Mediterranean fish soups: bouillabaisse, bourride, and so on. But I am informed that there is a special circle in Hell for people who eat these soups without crusty bread, so that wasn’t going to work. Passover has its down side.

Then I thought of Korean soup-stews. I surfed around the Internet to find some recipes, and eventually cobbled together something that seemed workable.

Passover Chigae

Here’s the mise en place for the stew, in no particular order. Chopped onions, slivered negi, two eggs, minced garlic, some shaved beef, cut-up gefilte fish, pack of fresh soft tofu, jar of kimchi, big bowl of stock (not all of which got used). Front-left, a little packet of spicy sesame miso, which I figured would be a decent substitute for gochujang, which is Korean spicy fermented soy paste. In the back, sesame oil, hot chile oil, and a bottle of kimchi juice, something you can get very easily here and which everyone apparently puts in chigae.

In case you’re wondering, Sam and Maia got udon soup noodles, which are about as far from spicy as it’s possible to be.

First up, start cooking the beef and the garlic in some sesame oil.

Add kimchi and a bit of kimchi juice.

Add onion.

When the stuff all seems basically cooked, add enough stock to make a thickish soup-stew. If you add a whole bunch, it gets watery, because the tofu will throw water of its own.

Bring to a strong simmer, taste, and add a splash or so of hot chile oil and another of sesame oil. Then add the gefilte fish balls and return to a strong simmer. (In the normal Korean dish you’d add fresh seafood, you see.)

Add the tofu in large cubes. You can also add the whole pad and kind of break it up coarsely, but the wife likes cubes. Bring to a boil, then reduce to a medium simmer.

Now I added a couple Tb of the spicy sesame miso. In some Korean recipes, they add gochujang somewhere along the line, and in others you see shrimp jut, which I’m not quite sure what it is. There’s also something called guk ganjang, which looks a lot like gochujang in the one photo I’ve seen, but I have no idea. Anyway, I added the miso at this point because you generally don’t want miso to be boiled, only simmered.

Once the miso was mixed in, I cracked two eggs on top and sprinkled with the negi shreds.

Now cover, bring to the tabletop induction burner, and bring the temperature to a gentle simmer. Wait a minute or two for the eggs to just barely set, and...

Ta da!

The Envelope Please...

Pretty delicious, a definite success. We got enough for four generous servings, easy, and the two of us polished off about two-thirds, so we were groaning a bit, fat but happy. It was spicy, but not blazing, with lots of complexity and depth. The gefilte fish chunks had a slightly odd texture for this stew, but mostly because we knew what they were in advance; I think if I had made gefilte fish with a little Korean twist along the way, such as a hint of garlic and sesame oil, it would have clicked perfectly. To top it off, the dish was disturbingly healthy, yet tasted like something self-indulgent.

A winner! Next time you have leftover gefilte fish, you know what to do.

Happy Japanese Passover

2009-04-13T22:28:00.006+09:00

Japanese Gefilte Fish

The Passover season crept up on me this year. Not being surrounded by a distinguished crew of Judaic Studies scholars as I usually am, I just didn’t notice. Besides, it’s not like there are a whole lot of Jews here, so the stores don’t fill up with matzoh as an early warning. In fact, so far as I can tell, you can’t get matzoh here for love or money, making Passover food rather tricky.

Fortunately, my mother sent me two boxes of Streit’s matzoh meal some months ago, for making matzoh ball soup, which the kids love — you should see Maia trying to eat a matzoh ball the size of a baseball. Other than that, the Passover season is pretty awful here if you’re observant (which I’m not) and follow the Ashkenazi tradition, which means you can’t eat rice, corn, or legumes in addition to any grain flour. That means you can’t eat much of anything here except vegetables and meat, and you can’t have seasoning with them, because most seasoning here involves soy sauce and/or sake, which is rice wine.

Now as I say, I’m not observant, but I generally make some effort to pay attention to the Pesach rules. I do cheat and follow the Sephardi rules about flour: rice and legumes are OK, though I don’t think you’re supposed to make bread out of them. That of course makes everything much easier. No, as far as I know I’m straight-up Ashkenazi, but I’m not above a little self-serving shifting around, and the Sephardim do have better food. Besides, it doesn’t really make that much difference from a Jewish legal standpoint: since I normally eat things like pork and shellfish, it’s pretty much irrelevant which version of the Pesach rules on leaven I decide to sort of obey.

In any event, one thing a lot of non-Jews don’t understand about Passover is that despite all the food restrictions, it’s really a very big food holiday. There are certain foods that are special Passover things, and although you can eat them any time, they’re extra-special at Passover. I suppose, though, that every Jewish holiday is a big food holiday, except for Yom Kippur when you fast. Well, anyway, Passover is big food.

Among the most famous, or infamous, of the Passover dishes is gefilte fish. Lots of people hate this, but lots of people haven’t had the good stuff. If you think gefilte fish comes in jars, for example, you haven’t had the good stuff.

You also have to like fish, I suppose, but it’s pretty mild and un-“fishy” if you use decent fish. And you have to like horseradish, the standard accompaniment.

Good fish? Horseradish? In Japan? You see my line of thinking....

Gefilte Fish 101

As far as I understand it, originally gefilte fish was stuffed fish: gefilte, filled. You took a whole salmon, gutted and boned it intact, and then stuffed it full of minced white fish (whitefish, pike, carp are the classics) mixed with matzoh meal and vegetables. Then you poached the whole thing in a strong stock made of all the bones and skins. You served it hot or cold, in the latter case often glazed with a bit of the jellied stock.

Now think about Thanksgiving turkey or whatever. You know how the turkey is pretty good, maybe, but the stuffing is evil and always eaten in much greater quantity? Okay, so let’s suppose you just made the stuffing by itself, but kept calling it “Thanksgiving turkey” anyway. Same thing: gefilte fish is the stuffing all by itself.

You take white fish, carrot, onion, egg, matzoh meal, and oil, and you make a fairly smooth puree. Then you poach fat patties of the stuff in a strong fish stock. You chill the patties, and serve them with horseradish sauce or relish. It’s usual to poach a whole carrot with the patties and serve it in slices.

Now I haven’t seen whitefish or pike here, and carp is I think out of season. But there are lots of good white fish here, and it’s not expensive to buy stuff good enough to eat raw. Carrots and eggs are easy and good, negi scallion substitutes well for onion (not that you can’t get onion, but negi have a nice bright flavor), and for horseradish wasabi root seems to be in season right now. Matzoh meal is tricky, but as I say, Mom sent me a bunch.

Making Gefilte Fish
If you want to play along at home, the recipe I more or less used is this one. Why? Because the 2d Avenue Deli is brilliant.

So, first, I bought about three pounds of white fish fillets and steaks. I bought buri and karei. Buri is Japanese amberjack, a species of yellowtail. Karei is a kind of flounder, actually a lot like sole.

Now I considered buying these things whole, but buri are huge, and I didn’t see any nice big fillets. As to karei, I just didn’t see any whole ones that didn’t cost a fortune, but cut ones were inexpensive, don’t ask me why. The problem is that when you buy cut fish here, it usually has a lot of bone in it, as well as the skin, and it’s a lot harder to deal with these in little pieces of fish than it is with whole ones. Nevertheless, I bought pieces. This meant half an hour removing bones and skin.

Fortunately, I have pretty good knives for this purpose. In fact, I had just sharpened my yanagiba (sashimi knife), used for skinning and for cutting the boneless flesh in slices or chunks, which speeded things along. In this photo, the really big knife is a gyutō, or Japanese-style chef’s knife; the thick black thing is a deba-bōchō, for dealing with whole and bone-in fish; and the thin shiny knife is the yanagiba, which is only used on boneless fish. For some reason the shine doesn't show well in this picture.

Actually, I had a disconcerting experience with this: as I was skinning the fish with that shiny yanagiba, and thinking how easy it is when your knife is really, really sharp, I got careless and just barely touched the tip of my left thumb with the blade.

The effect was electric. Instantly, the hair stood up on the back of my neck and I got a cold feeling in the pit of my stomach. I carefully put down the knife and started washing my hands, knowing I was going to have a nasty, bloody cut. In fact, however, I had to look hard to see it: at the tip of my thumb, in the very surface layer of skin, there is a small, perfectly straight cut. No blood, no nothing. But when I touched that blade that way, I knew. In case you were ever wondering what a very, very sharp knife is like, that’s one (extremely unsafe) way to know: if you touch the blade straight-on and get this reaction, it is very, very sharp.

In passing, there is a fun way to know if your knife is really sharp — not necessarily scary sharp, but sharp. Put the knife on its spine, edge up, on the board. Take a cherry tomato and hold it about a foot above the edge, and drop it. If the knife is really sharp, the tomato will cut cleanly. Isn’t that cool? I love this.

Anyway, other than nearly cutting myself in thin slices, it wasn’t that bad a process, just a little tedious.

Next I minced some carrot and negi and a bit of ginger. When in Kyoto....

Into the processor, and whizz! Took several batches, of course, because my processor is tiny. Then add beaten eggs, oil, salt, white pepper, and sugar, and stir well.

Incidentally, there seem to be a lot of people who freak out at the notion of sugar in gefilte fish. Why? Because they don’t know anything much about cooking. A little sugar goes into quite a number of dishes that aren’t sweet, because it helps bring out certain kinds of flavors. This is why you add it to tomato sauce, for example. And some kind of sweetness is extremely common in Japanese fish dishes, usually in the form of mirin (sweet cooking sake). With gefilte fish, the last thing you want is for the flavor to be dull or flat, so you use a little sugar. Why not?

Anyway, it looked like this after I beat it smooth.

Then I added matzoh meal and beat it smooth again.

Isn’t that delicious-looking? I knew you would. In any event, I covered it with plastic and put it in the fridge to set up and develop flavor.

About 10 hours later or so, when it was convenient, I cooked the stuff.

Along with the fish itself, I’d bought two packages of fish heads and bones for making simmered tai no ara, on which see this entry.

Yum! Fish heads!

I put these, all the trimmings from the fish and carrots and such, and some more carrot into a pot with a lot of water, then brought it gently to a boil, skimming scum as necessary. The puree I made into big lumps, sort of halfway between balls and patties. You do this with wet hands or stuffing of any kind sticks like mad.

These patties I gingerly lowered into the pot. Here I had a bit of trouble: I had so much trimmings and stuff for the soup that the patties were going to get impaled on bones. I put a colander in the pot over everything, which was fine, but I didn’t have a whole lot of space because the pot is too small. They fit in, just, so I left the lid on the pot, and figured they’d half-simmer, half-steam, which is fine — you want that with matzoh balls, for example, because they’re lighter that way. But then the things started to expand, which always happens when you cook stuff that has matzoh meal in it, which of course I hadn’t thought of. Argh! So I pulled out half and cooked them in two batches, which of course took an extra 90 minutes. Oh well. At least that gave me time to remember the carrot, which I forgot initially.

This is what they looked like straight out of the pot.

They went into the fridge covered with plastic, along with the carrot. Then I strained the stock, let it cool, and refrigerated it. (Useful tip: never cover hot stock and shove it in the fridge, because it tends to breed bacteria. Let it cool uncovered, then cover and refrigerate. If your kitchen is very hot, plan ahead and freeze several heavy-duty freezer bags full of water, then drop these in and stir in order to cool the stock rapidly without diluting it. But I digress.)

Preparing the Dish

The weather is medium-warm at the moment, and gefilte fish are really better cold, so that’s how I served them.

For some strange reason, the stock didn’t gel. I can’t think why, considering how much bone and stuff simmered in it for how long, but it didn’t. Thus I couldn’t glaze my gefilte fish, and I’m just saving the stock to make fish soup with.

For horseradish, I used fresh wasabi. Since it is essentially unavailable outside Japan, let me show you what it looks like and what you do with it. Here is a wasabi root, not very good quality, which cost about $6:

First you scrape the really dark stuff off the outside using the back of a knife, then cut off the very tip.

Then, as shortly before serving as possible (the stuff loses flavor rapidly), you grate it using a circular motion on a little grater. I’m using a ginger grater, because I see very little point in buying a sharkskin grater — the best for wasabi — since I can’t get wasabi outside Japan. Besides, a ginger grater works fine.

I decided to try two different approaches here. One is just plain wasabi, in a little ball, the way you see it (or rather, its artificial imitation) in sushi shops. But I also thought something more like a sauce would be nice. One of the most common sauces is mayonnaise, lemon juice, and horseradish, sometimes with beet juice added, so I figured I’d do a variant on that.

I put the juice of one little sudachi lime, a big blob of wasabi, and an egg yolk in a bowl with salt and pepper. Then I beat in oil, part olive and part canola, just the way you’d make mayonnaise.

To serve, I put two gefilte fish balls on a bed of lettuce, garnished with slices of the poached carrot, and presented with the two wasabis. Here's the photo again, in case you forgot:

Tasting

The taste was pretty good, but a little flatter than I’d have liked. The main thing was that the fish wasn’t really light enough, probably because buri wasn’t the best choice. It also lacked a bit of that distinctive gefilte fish texture, which is silky smooth, because the stock didn’t gel: if it does gel, you see, the fish balls are partly bound together with gelatin, making them silken. My wife isn't a big fan of that texture, so she didn't mind, but I think gefilte fish are better with it.

The wasabi was definitely not very good quality, and didn’t have nearly sufficient intensity. Straight, it seemed kind of bland, and in the sauce you could barely taste it at all. Still, when I used a fair wodge of the plain and the sauce together, they did come together nicely and had a good flavor.

Maia was okay with it, but only really liked the carrots. Sam insisted that it had to be warm, and then ate a couple of bites, but I don’t think he liked it much either. Mom and Dad ate them fairly happily, on the whole, but as I say I was a little bit disappointed — I made much better ones last year, but I don’t have that recipe with me here.

I suspect that our Japanese friends would like these things. That’s sort of how the whole idea started in the first place, actually, with us musing on how there are certain odd convergences of Japanese and Ashkenazi Jewish cuisine.

All told, a medium success.

Future Attempts

Unfortunately Sam is in school only a couple of hours in the morning for a couple of weeks, so I don’t have a whole lot of time to fool around in the kitchen, but I am planning to do my other gefilte fish recipe one of these days, Passover or no Passover.

See, I have this idea: what if there was a large Jewish population in some great culinary places where, in point of fact, there are basically no Jews? Japan is one, and that produces something like what I just did. Another is New Orleans. So how about gefilte fish, New Orleans-style? I’ve done it at home in Boston, with fair success, but now I’ve got access to much better fish and also know how to cut the things a good deal better. So we’ll see when I have time, but that’s coming up as soon as I can.

Not Lunch!

2009-03-06T00:52:00.005+09:00

I just want to point out that this is not a plastic flamingo.

I also want to point out to the flamingo that Sam is not a fish, and not lunch.

He may, currently, be pretending to be so blase that he might pass for a fish, but he is not a fish, and he is not to be eaten.

Rotten bird-brains.

Fish Heads, Fish Heads

2009-02-25T23:20:00.000+09:00

I'd like to share with you a classic Japanese home recipe that is cheap, delicious, exotic, and perhaps a little disturbing. Right up front, I'm going to call for help, though: the main ingredient isn't usually available as such in America, at least not on the East Coast, so substitution is necessary.

Brace yourself, some of this may get a little ugly.

Tai no Ara Taki (鯛のあら焚き): Bream-Bits Kindling

Tai (鯛), or sea-bream, is the king of fish in Japan. It's got a distinctive sweet taste, and it holds up well in an enormous range of different cooking types: raw, poached, broiled, simmered, etc. Its many parts are generally good eating as well, and to top it off it's pretty. This one looks rather small; the big ones are a good 2 feet long.

Once you've gracefully removed the fillets from the bones, though, why waste a good thing? What you have left is the ara, the bits: head, collar, fleshy backbone. There's good flavor there, and firm meat, so let's make something good out of it.

The name of this dish, the bit about “kindling” (taki), comes from the way it's cooked. Not that you light it on fire, but you put it on a bed of sticks of gobō (burdock) that look kind of like a pile of kindling. And then you simmer the heck out of the fish bits.

The end-result is a plate of bits with the head-halves on top, with a little gobō as a garnish, in a puddle of thick, rich, brown sauce. You sit there with chopsticks—and pretty soon your fingers too—and pick all the succulent parts out of the bits.

Sound gross? You'd be surprised. It's delicious.

What's more it's cheap, easy, and fairly quick.

The Fish

The first step, of course, is to acquire your fish. Tai aren't cheap, if they're any good, being the king of fish and all that. A big good one can run you more than $100 here... a lot more. But a decent one can be down around $25. You have to remember, from this you're getting two fillets as well as the bits for making this dish. One fillet you make into slices for the nabe pot, and the other you trim as sashimi, and all that's left is the bits, which you now turn into this wonderful side-dish. Here's one presentation of tai sashimi, which I had at Roan Kikunoi.

Of course, in America you can't get tai off the West Coast, at least not that's really worth eating. Certainly I wouldn't make sashimi out of it. So you've got two basic choices: buy a whole comparable fish, or convince the fishmonger to sell (or preferably give) you the heads.

I'm betting that if you cozy up to your fishmonger, he'll just give you the heads, as they're garbage to him. If we all can figure out an appropriate few fish for the purpose, this makes the dish dirt-cheap. In Japan, you can buy heads and bits for this purpose, but in the U.S. they throw them away as a rule.

Which fish? Err... that's where it gets tricky.

You need a firm, white-fleshed fish: salmon (red) or mackerel (blue) won't work. Salmon doesn't have enough taste, and mackerel has too much. You want a head that has lots of bits of meat and flesh to eat, and here my encyclopedias and such are no use, because they don't talk about this very much. Maybe a relative of the sea bream (Pagrus major, red Pacific seabream)?

I don't know. I'm going to proceed from here as though you have a tai on hand, and hope you'll try it with what's local and let me know.

The Head

So now you have a fish head. Ick!

No, wrong answer. The right answer is, "split it." Here's how:

CLICK THIS LINK

You now have your fish-head, split, possibly cut into medium chunks.

If you have a meaty backbone, shear off the part that still has skin up at the top and bottom. Then cut the backbone into chunks.

Put a big saucepan full of water over high heat and let it get close to a simmer, i.e. when little bubbles are definitely forming on the bottom of the pan and there is real steam rising. This is the point when you think, “it'll boil any second now,” creating the adage about a watched pot.

Drop in the fish, bring to a rapid boil over as much heat as you can, and then move the pieces into a big pot of ice water.

Once the fish is definitely cool, even cold, feel the surfaces all over for any blood clots or remaining scales. This is your last chance to scale, so make good use of it. A few scales are okay in this dish, but the fewer the better—and no scales is definitely excellence.

The Kindling

For one fair-sized tai head, you need one big or two medium stalks of gobō (burdock), which you can get at a surprising range of stores these days. If unsure, get it from an Asian market, which is sure to have it. It should be cheap: it's a destructive weed in America, so eat lots. It looks like this.

Scrub the burdock, preferably under running water, with a coarse plastic scrubber like you'd use for a nonstick pan. You want to get all the dirt off, and it can be pretty deep.

Cut the burdock lengthwise into quarters, then in about 2-inch lengths.

Rinse well in water and drain. Pour into a big, deep skillet or wide saucepan.

Arrange the fish bits on top, with the eyes upward.

At this point you can stop, cover the skillet with plastic, and refrigerate for a good 12 hours or so. Fish heads are perishable, of course, so you don't want to go too long, but this isn't a fine-detail sort of dish.

Cooking the Dish

About 60 minutes or so (and there is considerable latitude here to work earlier) before serving, add 400cc water and 400cc of drinkable sake. It doesn't have to be anything grand, but salted cooking sake is out. Put on a drop-lid, which should cover everything and be slightly covered with liquid. Add water if necessary.

For this I've used a folding drop-lid available at any hardware or home-good store here for about $2. You could also use a smallish pot-lid, a dinner-plate, or even a couple of sheets of paper towel. The dinner plate will be hard to lift, and the towel even more so, but all of these things work. The point is that this will hold the stuff under the liquid for a preliminary cooking.

Now bring the heat to medium and wait until the stuff comes to a true boil—not just a simmer, but a proper boil. Remove the lid—you won't use it again here.

Skim the white scum.

Add 5 generous Tb sugar and 50cc mirin; if you cannot get real mirin, as is likely, use 45cc sake and another Tb sugar—brown sugar would be lovely here. Shake the pan around a bit to distribute, and baste the fish with the liquid. Boil fairly rapidly—medium-high heat—until the liquid is reduced by about half, basting now and again.

Add 60cc soy sauce, or preferably tamari, but either will do fine. Keep boiling until the liquid is starting to turn into a syrup, basting fairly often.

Before it gets there, grate a big chunk of peeled ginger on the finest grater you've got, held over a bowl. Squeeze the gratings over the same bowl through a fine-meshed strainer. You should have fair bit of ginger juice.

When the liquid is turning to syrup, the bubbles will start getting fatter, the sound of the pan will change, and when you lift the pan and shake a bit, there won't be all that much liquid left.

Add the ginger juice and shake it around a bit, then baste vigorously as the sauce gets shiny and, well, sauce-like.

When it gets to this point, remove from heat. Put the bits in a soup plate or the like, garnish with a bunch of the burdock on the side in a clump or something, and then pour on the sauce.

Yum! Fish Heads!

To eat, just pick up an appetizing-looking bit and eat anything that isn't bone, munching and sucking as you go to get all the goodness out.

I know, sounds gross, but honestly it's wonderful. And if you can get fish heads for free or very, very cheap, as I suspect you can, you can make this dish for very little. What's more, it can sit for days and be picked at cold, lukewarm, or nuked-hot; it won't be as good as freshly-made, but it'll be good.

Conclusion

Now I want all of you to run right out and try this. The big question is the fish: what's white-fleshed, firm, flavorful, and fairly local? If there's a choice, what will the fishmonger give you for free? Now make the dish and tell me how it tastes, and whether the flesh is still firm enough to make it worth eating. I want you to figure it out, because I'm going to come back to the East Coast and want to make this (my wife loves this), and I want somebody else to have done the experimenting to figure out the right fish for the purpose.

Very Expensive Willy

2009-02-25T22:54:00.002+09:00

I don't know why, but suddenly this idea bubbled up, and I tricked my wife into translating the middle two lines (the first and last I could do myself):

ウィリー、ウィリー、Willy, Willy,
魚大きい sakana ooki!
とろのよう, toro no you,
うまうだよ umai da yo!

Willy, Willy,
A really big fish!
Just like toro,
Very tasty!

(Sing Japanese lyrics to the tune of "Flipper")

Fancy Fish

2009-02-23T22:31:00.004+09:00

Today it hit me that I have been talking, thinking, reading, and generally mucking about with food for months without cooking anything especially interesting. In part this is because I have to feed the kiddies, but mostly I've just been focused on other things.

Then I went into Tavelt for the first time. This is the food court supermarket underneath Fuji Daimaru department store. I was stunned: good prices, wide range, all kinds of great things. So I just sort of grabbed, thinking vaguely in the back of my head what sort of stuff I might do with it all, and ended up with a pile. Some is in the fridge for tomorrow, but a lot got used tonight.

Now first of all, I reheated yesterday's leftover spaghetti with homemade meat sauce, which Sam had inhaled. Garnished with lots of grape tomatoes and a hefty grating of real Parmesan, it looked like this:

Here's what Sam thought of it:

So that was him sorted out. I saved some pasta and tomatoes for Maia, no problem.

For mom and dad, I had two things that looked particularly excellent: buri toro and hamasa loin. In English, that's the fatty cut of yellowtail (buri) and the loin of amberjack. Total cost, about $10US for a lot of meat. (Told you Tavelt has good prices!) All of it was marked otsukuri-yo お造り用, i.e. "good for eating raw in slices," so I figured I could do what I liked.

I also got a pile of something akin to tatsoi, some kind of little greens, and then those little tomatoes, and I have shallots, and then some karami-daikon, which is a sort of spicy daikon radish that is a special seasonal thing in Kyoto (and infinitely superior to regular daikon -- just a hint to anyone who just might possibly be growing organic vegetables in a cold climate). So I made a tossed salad out of all this stuff, slicing much of it thin with my brand-new toy:

(Note wine bottle for size comparison.) A 270mm Masamoto gyuto, the most spectacular knife I have ever held in my hand and one of the finest gyuto in the world, no question. This was my very belated holiday present. (The lateness is me agonizing about what to buy.)

I tossed the salad with olive oil, a spritz of lemon juice and a dash of red wine vinegar, lots of fresh-ground black pepper and a hint of salt, and a bit of grated Parmesan.

For the yellowtail, I decided that I would do half as raw slices and half in a tartare. I cut half the fish into coarse cubes, and then hand-minced it fine with the heel end of my whacking great 200mm deba knife:

To this was added some of that spicy daikon, chervil, tarragon, lemon juice, salt, pepper, chiffonaded shiso leaves, and super-fine-minced shallot. Mince some more to mix, pack into a small bowl, cover tightly with plastic, leave on the counter for a few hours (the house is pretty cold, and what's going to happen to it anyway?). I served the tartare in a sort of coarse cylinder, since the cylindrical molds I have are either way too small or way too large, and garnished with thin toast. I plated this with the salad and the rest of the yellowtail cut in slices. The results:

For the amberjack, I coated the surface with minced chervil, shiso, scallion, salt, pepper, and a lot of koji-miso, which is a chunky kind of miso that is especially good roasted. I wrapped it tightly in plastic and let it sit for several hours. Then at the last minute I put it on my stovetop wire grill over super-high heat, barely 2 minutes a side, let it rest a minute or two, and cut in fat slices. I served it with shredded daikon (I cheated and used the stuff that came in the packaging of the fish -- nobody eats the stuff anyway), fresh shiso leaves, a dip of soy and grated karami-daikon, and a little fresh-grated real wasabi. Looked like this:

General opinion was that this meal was pretty terrific. I'm proud of it, really: I didn't use recipes, just made it up on the fly, and it was very, very good. Of course, 90% of the quality came from the wonderful fish, but I suppose it's that last 10% of bringing the ingredients forward that makes the difference.

Home Delivery

2009-02-13T23:16:00.004+09:00

On the other hand, back to food...

We ordered in the other night, and you have to check this out.

When you order in food in Japan, they often bring the stuff in actual dishes. When you're done, you wash the dishes and they pick them up the next day. Neat, huh? No charge.

Now we've ordered all kinds of things -- noodles, sushi, whatever. But this time we ordered rice in a kaman, which is an old-fashioned pot. When you do this, you get individual kaman with slightly flavored rice and stuff on top. We had this way up north, in Tsukuba, and that inspired us to order it here in Kyoto. It's good cold-weather food.

Here's what you get:

A wood-lidded kaman in a box, a bowl, a dish with pickles, and a triple dish with condiments (wasabi, nori, and minced negi). Each serving comes on a tray, and has a little shamoji, a sort of rice spatula. You also get a pitcher with hot dashi stock for everybody.

What you do is, you scoop out a serving, eat it, scoop more, and so on. When and if you want to, you scoop more and add dashi to make a sort of soup, which is how you finish up what's in the kaman.

My version was vaguely Korean bibimbap: soft-boiled egg, kimchi, scallion, bits of shredded beef, and so on.

Mom got chicken and stuff -- pretty basic:

And Sam got fried chicken, weenies, and a hard-boiled egg that he devoured before I could take the photo.

In the event, the fried chicken was terrible -- that's a surprise, really, because usually it's wonderful here -- but the weenies were excellent, like good American hot dogs rather than Japanese-style crunchy wieners. For adults, I'd say the weenies were mediocre, but Sam prefers non-crunchy hot dogs and did fine with this. Mostly he ate rice and egg, which is no sin.

Mainly, I just think it's cool that this stuff was all delivered for less than the cost of two big pizzas at home. (Of course, one of these days I'm going to blog what happens if you order pizza here and don't ride herd on them -- the combinations they come up with are very, very disturbing. But that's another post... one labeled "horrors.")

Feelthy Peectures

2009-02-13T22:55:00.006+09:00

Okay, those who are easily shocked, or remotely prudish, please don't read this.

It has nothing to do with food.

It's tacky.

Nothing whatsoever to do with food.

And REEEAALLLY tacky. As in sleazy.

But I couldn't resist.

No, really, this is not family viewing.

Please, just skip, okay?

Still here?

Okay.

So as you know, I recently went to Lotteria with the crew and had burgers.

Now across the street was a place that sells really cheap, junky clothing, including some kids' clothing, and we figured we might be able to pick up some stuff for our rotten daughter Maia who refuses to stop growing out of things, the little pig.

I was, predictably, bored senseless.

The place is geared for women, so there's nothing for me to do, and the toy selection was so awful that even Sam wasn't deterred for long.

But, because of Lotteria, I had my camera.

And I spotted some tacky things.

First of all, the lingerie display:

Isn't that elegant? I knew you would. Here's an up close and, um, personal:

I'm particularly impressed by the brown fuzzy bra on the far side.

WARNING -- my blog entry gets ugly at this point!

And then I thought, okay, there must be some really dreadful Japanglish T-shirts for kids, right? There were, but my eye was caught by the dreadful Japanglish underpants for little boys.

Here's one:

Be careful where you stick it out!

And another:

Where are you, Michael Jackson?

See, I told you it was tacky.

A Passable Attempt

2009-02-13T22:31:00.006+09:00

Okay, still on the subject of hamburgers after the Big Boy Hall Of Horrors, to say nothing of the Mos Burger Visitation Of Evil, the other day Sam decided he wanted a hamburger. (For Japanese readers, a reminder: that's a hamburger, not a hanbagu -- see the Big Boy post.)

See, I got fed up, and then I spotted a sale on cheap-o shaved beef for sukiyaki. I bought a kilo, brought it home, and spent 20 minutes with a big, heavy knife mincing it fine by hand. I made patties, we bought decent rolls and an acceptable couple of tomatoes, and the result was the best burger we've had in Japan. Sam loved it... and decided he wanted another one in a few days. Sale wasn't going, so that'd be expensive. Besides, I didn't have the time or inclination to spend half an hour mucking about with a whacking great knife.

So we tried another Japanese chain: Lotteria.

My basic opinion: surprisingly decent, functional hamburgers. But don't get fancy.

On this first go-round, I had a bacon-cheeseburger. Decent, but teeny, and the bacon of course is not cooked thoroughly, and the cheese is some sort of liquid gloop.

The wife had a teriyaki thingy, which she said was fine but looks very dubious to me.

Sam had a basic cheeseburger, which was the right choice.

Maia was given a deep-fried rice ball, but she mostly ate fries and ketchup instead, which I think was the right choice.

And then she drank the ketchup...

...with predictable results...

Since these photos were taken, I tried Lotteria's "straight cheeseburger." YES. That is the correct choice: go straight. Keep it simple. It had lettuce, onion, tomato, pickle, and ketchup, together with a functional fast-food burger (way better than McDonald's, for example), basic plastic cheese, and an acceptable plain bun. It looked surprisingly like the ad copy here.

So far, this is the best burger in Japan... except for me hand-mincing and going nuts, which was fabulous but expensive and time-consuming.

On the subject of homemade burgers, there are those who would tell you that it would be much, much better if I'd used wagyu beef, but it would cost a fortune and I'd have to start with about 1/2 pound per patty because so much of it would render out -- it's mostly fat, you know. Next time there's a sale, maybe I'll blog the process -- fun with knives!

Anyway, Lotteria gets a (somewhat surprising) thumbs up.

At Least Some Things Don't Change

2009-02-01T15:40:00.001+09:00

Ah, New Orleans, just like I remember her....

Cafe au lait and beignets...

Note that these are "mini-beignets" -- they don't have the regular kind.

Sam likes them, though:

Maia seems less impressed:

Yes, Cafe du Monde, Osaka. Just like New Orleans, really, except for the food and the people and the weather and the atmosphere and the music.

Not like the Cafe du Monde in the Kyoto main train station, though: despite the sign, they don't serve beignets.

And in case you were wondering, the franchise is owned by Mister Donuts (Misdo, as it's known here):

Not Quite Like Home

2009-01-21T13:59:00.004+09:00

I happened to wander out a bit west of our house — not my usual haunts — and along the way lost track of time. I found myself in need of lunch at 1:45, the problem being that most restaurants stop taking lunch orders at 1:30. But I spotted a Bob’s Big Boy, and thought, “well, I might was well check it out for Sam’s benefit.” I figured it would be nice for him to get a hamburger and fries sort of thing, but thought it’d be best if I made sure the hamburgers weren’t completely appalling.

Now here at this website, you can see the menu for Big Boy in the western part of Japan; the east part (which includes Tokyo) isn’t especially different. If you scroll down and click on a page of the menu, you can see it nice and big.

Notice something? Like, something missing?

That’s right: no hamburgers. This is Big Boy, which on its American page describes its “signature” sandwich like this:

THE BIG BOY® COMBINATION
The Original Double-Decker Hamburger
Five ounces of delicious 100% pure ground beef in two patties with American cheese, lettuce and our famous Big Boy special sauce on a sesame seed bun.
Served with French fries and cole slaw.

This sandwich, the Big Boy Sandwich, even gets discussion in a Wikipedia article about the chain. And in a Calvin Trillin article collected in his Tummy Trilogy, we learn that there are even people who claim that this burger is the best in America — though you have to go to the Burbank location, and get extra onions.

Japanese Big Boy has no hamburgers at all.

Well, let me be accurate. They have hanbagu but not hanbaga. Hanbagu is a bun-less hamburger, ground extremely fine, served with sauce. Hanbaga is a hamburger, i.e. ground beef on a bun. Japanese Big Boy also has various other kinds of meat: sliced steak (like London Broil, sort of), steak (but not very good), and a range of different sauces.

There’s also a salad bar, which was not really more or less dubious than what I’m familiar with in America, albeit the choice of dressings was different (sesame miso?).

Soup selection was corn, vegetable, or French onion. All the Japanese I saw of course got the corn soup, which they love; the onion was terrible — thin-flavored, having no noticeable beef stock in it. You’d think a place that serves that much beef ought to be able to use the scraps to make a respectable beef stock, but apparently not.

Oh — and no fries. You get about five baked potato wedges with your hanbagu, and a single broccoli floret to make it a complete meal. Choice of rice or rolls.

But I cannot get over this: Big Boy doesn’t serve burgers? What’s up with that? It’s not exactly difficult.

If you cook hanbagu, you can cook hanbaga. If you serve rolls, you can put a burger on one. If you have a salad bar, you can put on lettuce, tomato, and onion. Ketchup is very popular. Cheese hanbagu are on the menu, so a cheeseburger is also possible. And no self-respecting Japanese family restaurant doesn’t have buckets of mayo, from which to make Bob’s Special Sauce (which is basically Russian dressing), as well as cole slaw from the ever-popular range of cabbages. Fried things — shrimp, for example — are on the menu, making fries easy. So you should be able to knock out the Big Boy Combination, and any of the other classic Big Boy hamburger sandwiches, without breaking a sweat or changing your cooking line.

For the convenience of anybody who works for Big Boy Japan, here are two pictures to compare. This is a hanbagu:

This is a hamburger:

Got it? Thank you.

While I’m at it, let me point out that they don’t serve any sandwiches: it’s not just hamburgers.

Now I’m not a huge Big Boy fan or anything, but I figured it was a reliable place to get a burger. I hereby protest: this is wrong.

(Of course, what it tells you is that apparently Japanese people do not on the whole like hamburgers, which I suppose explains the success of Mos Burger.)

Chocolate Weirdness
On the way home, Sam spotted another little boy who was eating a chocolate bar. He of course demanded (actually he asked politely, but with a kid his age a polite request is backed by the threat of a tantrum) a chocolate bar of his own. At Family Mart (one of many huge chains of convenience stores) he picked out this:

A Crunky Bar. Sort of like Nestle Crunch, but the crunchies are a bit salty, which is not bad.

I find the name peculiar. It looks like a mis-transcription of an L as an R, but that would make a Clunky bar, which is presumably not the idea. My wife, who says this is a relatively old product, thinks it’s a combination of “chunky” and “crunchy.” I suppose that makes sense: if you did it the other way around, you’d have a Chunchy bar, which is even less appetizing than Crunky.

But I’m sorry, “Crunky” does not work for me as the name of a food. Is that just me?

Sushi Bullies

2009-01-09T22:34:00.002+09:00

I was reading some foodie web forum stuff and stumbled on this article from the Wall Street Journal. It documents the phenomenon of “sushi dictators,” sushi chefs who bully their customers about the right way to eat their sushi. A few quotes from the article:

Geri-Ayn Gaul had her first encounter with a raw-fish autocrat in August at Ino, in San Francisco. First, she tried to add some soy sauce to her seaweed salad. Big mistake. Chef Noboru Inoue scolded her, she says, telling her, “No, no, no. No soy sauce!” Then, she had the temerity to scrape some wasabi off a piece of sushi, because she doesn’t like spicy food. The chef’s response, she says: “‘No. It needs the wasabi.’” She obeyed, and choked down the fish. “I was so nervous, I spilled my miso soup,” says Ms. Gaul, whose meal for two, with no alcohol, cost $75 — before tip.

Each sushi dictator has his own pet peeves, but there is common ground. Most do not allow sushi bar patrons to order off the menu. Instead, diners must accept whatever the chef gives them, a tradition known as “omakase” — a Japanese expression that can be loosely translated as “trust the chef.” They reserve special enmity for spicy tuna rolls — typically made with scraps of raw tuna, mayonnaise and chili powder — which they say were only invented so that restaurants could mask the taste of substandard fish. And they generally loathe the ubiquitous California roll. Not only is it a newfangled American invention that combines avocado and cucumber, but it usually contains imitation crab — anathema to chefs who have spent so much of their energy and money securing pristine seafood.

Dealing with American diners who are unfamiliar with centuries-old Japanese culinary traditions can be agonizing for some chefs, says Andy Matsuda, head of Sushi Chef Institute, a Los Angeles cooking school. Requesting fried soft shell crab rolls at a traditional sushi bar is akin to “going to your grandma’s Thanksgiving dinner and someone brings a pizza,” Mr. Matsuda says. Dousing sushi in soy sauce is like pouring ketchup over the entrée at a three-star French restaurant. Other offenses, such as ordering miso soup at the beginning of the meal, only add to chefs’ frustration. But some chefs say that strict adherence to tradition is also a way to stand out in an increasingly crowded market.

Okay, let me just say, this sort of thing really gets my goat. I don’t like the way these chefs are behaving, I don’t like the idea that they’re doing it because of authentic centuries-old tradition, and I don’t like the idea that treating guests rudely and claiming authenticity gains you more money and respect from foodies, though the last point only goes to show my basic conclusion that 99% of foodies are idiots.

Some Basics On Sushi
Sushi is not the be-all and end-all of high-end Japanese dining. Sushi is not centuries old. Sushi is not the pinnacle of Japanese cuisine. Sushi chefs are not guardians of tradition. All of this is absolutely nonsense.

If anyone has a claim to these various things, it’s kaiseki chefs. Their food tradition really does go back to chanoyu (tea ceremony) and the little nibbles you served with this extremely harsh and bitter tea. It has evolved tremendously from that point, and in fact barely resembles its origin-point (which is still represented in various places around Kyoto), but kaiseki really is that old. What’s more, it has been held as the pinnacle of Japanese culinary art for a couple of centuries now. Kaiseki chefs are quite often seen as upholders and guardians of a grand tradition bound up with premodern culture; some of them are very insistent about this, refusing to cook in convenient white jackets, or to use ingredients that were not definitely established in Japan before Commodore Perry arrived and opened the country, and so on.

Sushi is a Johnny-come-lately. It was invented in the 19th century as street food. It derives from an old system of fish preservation, in which you had a strongly vinegared rice cake and pressed raw fish on top of it, often salted; the vinegar and salt acted as preservatives. This kind of sushi is still commonly available, primarily in the Kansai region, and it looks and tastes almost nothing like the sushi you’re probably familiar with. Thus sushi as you know it is as ancient and authentic as the American hamburger.

The natural habitat of sushi, as of a great deal of Japanese food, is the bar. When you go out for sushi, you go to a bar, and if you don’t have a lot of people or don’t want privacy for close conversation, you should sit at the bar. You order drinks, and you order whatever you feel like from the menu, as you like it, when you want it. Take your time. It’s good to chat with the chef: what does he think is especially good? But the point here isn’t that he’s the master and you the acolyte. He knows better than you what he’s got, is all, and you don’t want to order your favorite thing when it’s not going to be all that great, especially if something else you love is super-great today. What’s more, “great” isn’t equal to “fresh”: all the seafood is going to be fresh, but contrary to popular foodie opinion, just because it’s fresh doesn’t mean it’s excellent.

I was struck by this last point just today when I was in Nishiki market and saw two guji (what non-Kyoto-ites call amadai, which I am informed is “tilefish”) that looked pretty much the same to me, but one cost ¥1800 (about $20) and the other ¥8000 (about $85). Based on the way Nishiki does business, and who with, I am sure the difference was very real, but both fish were absolutely fresh: I bought the cheap one, in fact, and am prepared to swear that even after a couple of hours of cutting and scaling and messing around generally, the eyes remained clear and the flesh sweet. The fish was indeed excellent, much better than just about anything I’ve seen in America — but I’m sure the ¥8000 one was genuinely a lot better. Fresh is a minimum, not the only point.

In any event, let’s just wrap our minds around this clearly, okay? Sushi is a recent culinary invention, served in an informal atmosphere, presenting fish (mostly) that is fresh in the way just about all fish here is fresh — though some is better than others — and you’re supposed to drink with it.

Omakase
Would people get over the whole master-acolyte thing already? Here’s a translation: “prix-fixe menu.” An enormous number of Japanese restaurants of all types run heavily on these menus, and in fact many of them have no a la carte menu at all. To understand this, you have to think about two things: the food distribution system and the hyper-intense focus on freshness.

If I am running a very high-end restaurant, I serve guests by reservation only, and I use only prix-fixe menus, possibly graded by price (low, medium, high, and “how much were you interested in spending?”). That way I know how many I’ve got for dinner, and I and my staff go out and buy the ingredients we will need for them that morning. We spend the afternoon prepping what can be pre-prepped. When our guests arrive, we know who they are and what they are eating, and we begin finishing and plating dishes. The only thing that is not pre-planned is what they will drink, and how much, but drinks keep well. At the end of the day, I have nothing in the kitchen other than absolute staples like oil, soy sauce, and vinegar. (To be fair, there are some dishes that require advance preparation, and I can either choose to serve those only to people who reserved more than a day in advance, or I can estimate how many plates I will have on Tuesday and make that many pre-preps on Monday. But I won’t do this kind of thing much, because I really, really hate having to throw away food.)

This is how good kaiseki places work, for example. So now you understand the first dimension of omakase as a system. It means that there is no waste, and nothing sits in a walk-in freezer for months waiting to be ordered. This keeps profits and quality up, but it does mean that diners have to get used to not ordering à la carte.

The second part of omakase to understand has to do with the informal bar environment of sushi, as opposed to kaiseki and the like. If we sit and chat and drink, and order nibbles as we go, we can quickly run up a very high tab without realizing it. I mean, each thing was only $4, maybe, but we ate a lot, and all of a sudden our wallets are hurting. One way to avoid this is to ask the chef to work on a fixed budget. Again, most places will have pre-set grades for this. But the point is you say you’d like to do $60 per person, not including alcohol, and you don’t have to worry about ordering, about what’s good today, and what the final bill will be. Omakase isn’t about bullying people into eating the right way, it’s about relieving them of a certain amount of anxiety that can make the evening less enjoyable than it might be. If you’re flush, go ahead and order whatever you want, when you want: you’re not worried about the bill, so have fun.

These two dimensions of the omakase thing have an important implication. What if you want to go to a fancy kaiseki place but you really hate squid? Well, you tell them when you make the reservation, of course. They’re not going to serve squid to somebody who they know hates it; why should they? If you tell them when you get to the restaurant, you may be out of luck, because they’ve only got what they’ve got. But a really good chef will almost certainly be able to whip up a replacement for something on the fly. I wouldn’t try it: I’d give advance warning if I had a real hatred out there. On the other hand, if you patronize a good place regularly, the chef is going to know you hate squid, but he may some time try to tempt you with a special bit of squid preparation that might change your mind.

Once again, omakase doesn’t mean “eat what we tell you to or get out.”

Authentic Service
Service at a good sushi place is a lot like service at a certain sector of the kaiseki world, specifically the places where you generally sit at the bar. Everyone always says the service in kaiseki is very graceful, and it is, but it’s also very subtly graceful.

So here’s you, sitting at the bar, and the chef puts a dish in front of you. He tells you what it is, and tells you what the dipping sauce is and which thing it’s for, and maybe he says that this particular thing doesn’t need a lot of sauce. Why is he doing this? Because you will enjoy your food more if you know what it is and if you eat it knowledgeably. If something comes with soy sauce for dipping, and the chef says you probably don’t want a whole lot, he’s making a suggestion for what he thinks is the best way to eat it. If you want to put more on, go ahead, but know that you may not be getting the flavor balanced quite the way he has in mind. Does that matter? Not necessarily, but quite often at a kaiseki place you have only a somewhat indistinct understanding of what you’re eating anyway, because kaiseki is so different from everything else. You think, “well, this dish is basically X, he said, so I season that this way, but the chef said to go light on that seasoning.” Maybe this is because this dish is based on something you know well, as is usually the case in kaiseki, but the flavors and such are sufficiently different from what you expect that the seasoning will behave differently.

Let’s suppose you’re eating this, and you just love it. You say, “wow, I always hated this when mom made it, but this is totally different. What are these red things in it anyway, pickles?” The chef is going to chat with you about it. Yes, they’re pickles, but they’re not the red turnip pickles you think; rather, they’re these special melon pickles, and they add this sweet vinegariness that balances with this other thing. What’s more, chances are, the chef is going to joke with you about your mother: “really, you hated this when your mother made it? What did she do to it?” And back and forth.

By the end of the meal, you’re full, you’ve eaten a huge number of little interesting things and thought about them with mind and eye and mouth, and you’ve got the impression that the chef cares about you. Are you having a good time? Do you like what you’re eating? If you’re deep in conversation with your partner, on the other hand, the chef will put things in front of you almost silently, just barely explaining and disappearing again. But if you’re looking expectant and interested, he’ll talk to you.

Here’s the trick: the chef is an entertainer. He entertains with his food, but properly speaking he entertains with the entire experience. He wants you to leave thinking, “gee, I had the most fabulous time, that was so great!” And everything he can do to make this happen is part of his art as a chef, concluding with his thanking you and seeing you to and in fact past the door: he’ll wait at the door until you turn the corner.

(Incidentally, I keep saying “he,” and the sad thing is that it’s true: women are essentially unwelcome in high-end Japanese kitchens, with a very few exceptions. Japanese food is very good, on the whole, but the place isn’t utopia.)

Now if you’re eating at a good sushi place, the same is basically true. There’s a lot less range in sushi — it’s basically seafood (mostly but not exclusively raw), with or without rice, with a narrow range of sauces. But still, the chef can entertain. He’s going to chat with you, make jokes, tell you what he’s got that seems extra-good, maybe give you a price-break on something you’ve already ordered twice and seem to be adoring, whatever.

So let’s suppose the sushi chef hands you some nigirizushi (the stuff on the rice ball). He says, “you don’t need much soy with this, and take it easy on the wasabi.” What does this mean? It means, “this particular piece of fish is a little different than you might expect it to be, and it will in my opinion taste better quite lightly seasoned.” It may also mean “I have partly pre-seasoned it, so if you use too much it will be over-seasoned,” but he’d probably say so. So let’s suppose you like a lot of wasabi, and you use it. What then? Nothing. I mean, so what? Maybe you didn’t get the most perfect experience of this fish, but you know, maybe you did — maybe your palate is different from his, who knows? This isn’t an occasion for anyone to be shocked. If you do habitually eat the way the chef thinks you ought to, without prompting, he may compliment you on this, but again the point isn’t that other diners are bad. Positive rather than negative reinforcement sort of thing.

So authentic service, if that’s what you want, means gracious, elegant service. But in the West, “gracious, elegant service” sometimes means “feeling cowed by a French maître-d’hôtel who seems to sneer at you.” I don’t mean that. I mean that true elegance and grace in food service means the diner feels welcome, attended to, and comfortable. If possible, the diner should enjoy the food, find the atmosphere pleasant, and find all the various pieces of the dining experience stimulating. Upon departing, the diner should feel that the hosts hope he has enjoyed himself, and that they genuinely hope he will patronize their establishment in the future. That’s a very high bar to set, and it’s one that almost no restaurants I have eaten in in America come up to.

Authentic Sushi Bullies
Let’s see about these places.

Is the food authentic to centuries of Japanese tradition? No, it’s sushi.

Is the service authentic to high Japanese culinary tradition? No, it’s rude.

I can agree with them that a lot of popular maki rolls are nasty, but you don’t have to be rude about it. Somebody asks for something with spicy mayo, try this: “sorry, I don’t keep mayonnaise, and I don’t know how to make this roll. May I suggest this other thing instead?” Gee, that was hard. But no, “Ted Golden, a 29-year-old technology entrepreneur, says he would sometimes try to converse with Mr. Kosugi, whom he knew well — he estimates that he ate at Soto roughly 100 times — but the chef would be so focused on his work that he would refuse to answer.” The chef won’t even talk to very regular patrons, except to yell at them and even throw them out if they violate his personal principles.

So how does this work? Why do people tolerate this nonsense? Simple: because they have been deceived by ignorant, prating food journalists and the like into believing that sushi is the pinnacle of Japanese culinary tradition: “Fans of the despots say they put up with the chefs’ behavior because the food is so good and they feel they are getting an authentic meal. Ms. Gaul, a 27-year-old pharmaceutical saleswoman, says she loved the monkfish liver and fresh sea urchin at Ino so much that she plans to go back, even though she is ‘afraid’ to go without a Japanese-speaking companion. ‘I will take his somewhat abrasive advice because he’s teaching me about Japanese culture,’ Ms. Gaul says of Chef Inoue.” Really? Or is he tricking you into believing this? Notice the linkage here: if Ms. Gaul is treated rudely, she is learning “about Japanese culture,” and “getting an authentic meal.” People have been cowed for years into believing that expensive means authentic, and that chefs are the arbiters of authentic tradition.

“For his part, Mr. Kosugi [of Soto restaurant] says he is deeply disturbed by characterizations of him as a tyrant, and that many stories about him are untrue. He admits, though, that the pressure can make him moody and that he is ‘very ashamed and cannot sleep at night’ after behaving badly. He moved to New York, he says, because he felt the market there was more conducive to serving only traditional, high-end food.” What’s traditional and high-end about sushi? Since when was it legitimate for a sushi chef to claim these things? (Answer: very recently.) Since when was it appropriate for any chef to berate customers whose palates are not precisely the same as the chef’s? (Answer: never.)

These sushi bullies capitalize on their patrons’ ignorance and willingness to bow low before the altar of all things Japanese: they state implicitly that they are the arbiters of all Japanese culinary tradition, and they hold out the possibility of legitimation to people who submit to their authority. If you come away from a restaurant like this and get a nod of approval, you feel that you’ve made it, you’ve succeeded at something. “It’s a point of pride for Teddy Zee, a movie producer in Los Angeles, that Kazunori Nozawa will make him sushi with slightly less rice than usual. ... ‘In a stupid way, it makes you feel a bit special,’ Mr. Zee says.” Congratulations, Mr. Zee: you have succeeded at paying a great deal of money to make yourself into somebody’s dog, who wags his tail when petted and gets nervous and guilty when ill-treated.

A Quick Counter-Check
I live in Kyoto, where sushi isn’t the thing. But we spent New Year’s (o-shogatsu) in Tokyo, which invented sushi. I asked about this phenomenon there, and they said that they had sort of dimly heard of it. This is my wife’s host-family, some of whom are pretty hard-core foodies, and well known at a number of fancy sushi and other places. They basically said that they thought this kind of behavior does exist in Japan, but it’s despicable, recent, and unusual. Their basic feeling is that a place where the chef acts like this is soon going to have a clientele of screwups and weirdos, not serious connoisseurs. My interpretation of that one is that connoisseurs of all sorts like to disagree — that’s part of the fun. And if three connoisseurs go to a fancy sushi place to argue about sushi, they don’t want the chef having tantrums because he disagrees with at least two of them — they want him to join in and tell them they’re all wrong... and maybe shave a tiny bit of this or that as a free taste to prove his point.

A New Tradition?
Unfortunately, there is more to be said here.

In the Edo period, from 1600 to 1868 when the country was closed, a number of Japan’s artistic and other forms developed into established za, or schools, headed by iemoto, masters of a “way.” You probably know about this primarily in terms of things like martial arts, where masters of karate, iaido, aikido, kendo, and the like became essentially living cultural artifacts. This phenomenon was particularly acute, however, in the arts: Nō drama developed and crystallized in this fashion, as did flower-arrangement (ikebana), tea ceremony (chanoyu), and the like. By the Meiji Restoration of 1868, many of these masters had established themselves as arbiters of Japanese tradition, and with the opening of the country they entrenched against Westernization and change. With the rise of fascistic militarism in the 1920s and 30s, a great number of these schools went all-out for authentic Japaneseness. It’s a dark chapter in Japanese art history.

With the end of the war and the dramatic turn in popular Japanese consciousness, however, this kind of insistence on authentic tradition for its own sake came to be seen as tainted. Some schools died, others opened to change, and others simply faded quietly into the background. Kaiseki, to take one example, became increasingly divided between traditionalists and those interested in learning from French and other culinary traditions. So far as I know, however, even the most hard-nosed traditionalists did imbibe from the Western cup, and for sure the nouveau types didn’t discard older traditions. This is part of what makes kaiseki (or kyo-ryori) a truly dynamic art form and not a static museum-piece.

A crucial factor in these various developments is very often Western perception. Martial arts were able to retain their dogmatic insistence on traditionalism, and in fact their right-wing political orientation, because Westerners idolized them. Think of the ninja phenomenon, the samurai shtick, the sale of “secret fighting arts” material, and so on, not to mention movies like The Last Samurai. On the other hand, one factor that has allowed major schools of ikebana flower arrangement to develop in wild, avant-garde directions is that very, very few Westerners idolize them, and the few who do are actually quite interested in and knowledgeable about flower arrangement.

So this thing about sushi bullies worries me. We’ve got the same factors: an isolated tradition in Japan that gets idolized uncritically by Western consumers, and the development of chefs who see themselves as arbiters of Japanese tradition. Because Westerners will pay more for this, these chefs legitimate themselves with their customers’ cash.

Ultimately I’m saying that the foodie idiots who buy into this are buying scary right-wing nationalist politics. I’m saying that in Japan, someone who holds himself up as the arbiter of true authentic Japaneseness and dictates what is and isn’t Japanese is under suspicion for being a right-wing menace. And by right-wing I don’t mean “conservative,” even as the Bush Republicans mean it. I mean right-wing like fascistic militarism. I mean right-wing like white supremacists who think saving America means white people with guns dominating “lesser” beings. That kind of right-wing: scary loonies.

I’m not saying that these chefs think like the Klan, but what they’re doing matches the classic Japanese model for that kind of development disturbingly closely. In the article cited above, it says that “Sushi Nozawa is one of the highest-rated restaurants in the local Zagat guide; the description says Kazunori Nozawa ‘makes the Soup Nazi look polite.’” What worries me is that this joking remark may be rather closer to the truth than anyone realizes.

Kichisen Kaiseki Dinner

2008-12-26T12:17:00.005+09:00

Christmas Eve is my wife’s birthday, so we decided to go for kaiseki again. We arranged a babysitter for the little monsters, and called Kichisen for a reservation.

Kichisen was recommended to us by the Kyoto Foodies as the best traditional-style kaiseki in Kyoto. We were more than a little worried about the reservation, since we were calling just a couple of days in advance for dinner on one of Japan’s top date nights, at an amazingly celebrated restaurant whose chef beat Morimoto Masaharu on the original Japanese Iron Chef program — no mean feat, especially considering he won unanimously against Morimoto, who almost never lost. In the event, we called, and they said no problem, see you then.

Kichisen, known also as Kisen, is in Shimogamo, which is a triangular area of northern Kyoto defined by the two big streams that join to form the Kamogawa river. The restaurant is on the southwest corner of Shimogamo Shrine, an old (technically older than Kyoto itself, in fact) and picturesque shrine with lots of grounds that you can see from well down the Kamogawa. The doorway could be anything old-fashioned, really: a big house, a ryokan, anything. But it’s a restaurant.

We go in, slip off our shoes, and are led immediately to the right, into a little room with a bar and a stone floor. We’re given straw slippers to wear from the door to the bar, and I have some trouble putting them on because my feet are big and besides I’m wearing socks, the latter making it tricky to get the sandal thong between my toes. But the distance is about six feet, so it hardly matters. A burly man with a widow’s peak, wearing a white gi top — like a martial arts uniform — took my coat and folded it neatly on the shelf behind us. He also gave my wife a blanket to keep her legs warm, which is a common routine at nice places in the winter. We sat.

For Openers
The burly man went behind the bar and the various other attendants and such vanished. It was just us and him. After handing us hot towels, he promptly gave us these little dishes filled with hot dashi sprinkled with toasted rice (genmai, like in genmai-cha). Pleasant, warming, and stimulating the appetite.

He also checked that we spoke Japanese — me, no, but my wife certainly does — and then asked whether there was anything we don’t like to eat. Nope, we eat everything, no worries. (I wasn’t going to mention the one Japanese favorite I almost always dislike, which is boiled or simmered daikon, because I think he would have been well within his rights to chuck me out. It would be sort of like going to a high-end Italian place and saying you can’t stand garlic, cheese, tomatoes, or pasta. Not that daikon dominates Japanese food, any more than that little list dominates good Italian cooking, but it’s a constant presence. More about this later.)

On to the first course, presented in these cute little dishes, on top of this piece of calligraphy. He explained that we’re leaving the year of the Rat and entering that of the Cow, so in late December we get both. The calligraphy was, as I understand it, a poem with very heavy allusions to Sen no Rikyu, the inventor of tea ceremony and thus the ultimate forefather of kaiseki.

Inside the dishes, a range of things, not all of which we can identify. From left, clockwise, in the top container: Sliced duck squares sandwiched around a thin slice of sweet simmered something, possibly some kind of sweet turnip or maybe fruit. A cube of some kind of tofu cake, I think with gingko nuts in it. Broccolini simmered in what I believe was Tosa-zu (Tosa-style vinegar), seasoned with ground toasted sesame. A teeny-tiny piece of a stick of super-mild pickled ginger. In the very front right, where you can't see them, were two little long-simmered whole fish, to be eaten whole. In the lower dish were two things: yellow stuff and green stuff. My wife thinks the yellow stuff might have been prepared persimmon of some kind; I think she's wrong, but I can't offer any better guesses. The green stuff... no idea. Maybe some sort of bamboo shoot, but that's out of season, so who knows?

On With The Show
We continued with a clear soup: dashi, shiitake cap, teeny baby bok choy, and a cube made primarily of Ise-ebi (spiny lobster), garnished (aromatized) with julienned yuzu zest. The chef instructed us to taste the dashi first by itself, then drop the yuzu in the front and taste again, and then eat the things in the soup in between sips of broth. That business with the yuzu creates the effect called “aromatized”: the dashi remains dashi (and very good dashi at that!), but the yuzu adds an intense acid-floral aroma. My sense was that these two strongly different flavors are supposed to create a sort of frame for the things in the soup, but I could well be misunderstanding. In any case, it was nice finally to have a classic suimono clear soup made by somebody who’s into it, and I must say that it's lovely when done right.

Next up, otsukuri, which is the local term for what Tokyo-ites call sashimi. It didn’t come up, but it was becoming clear that if we had asked the chef, he would have told us that the proper word is “otsukuri,” although of course a lot of hicks from polluted holes like Tokyo use silly terms like “sashimi.” He is, as you’ll have figured out, pretty proud of Kyoto — “best food in the world.” He also doesn’t like food outside Japan, and told us about how he ate uni (sea urchin) in New York; his host apparently said it was very good, so he was polite, but actually he thought it was old and nasty. Tokyo, he doesn't like much either -- the air is foul and you can't breathe. The only place he seemed to have anything nice to say (other than Kyoto) was Finland, where he liked the fact that the air is clean. Back to food, he also didn’t like the bread in France, but we had to disagree (equally politely) about that one! In any event, the uni question came up because of the otsukuri he served.

The photo is too bright because of the shaved ice, I’m afraid, but you can still see what we ate. Dead-center is a raw shrimp, behind which is a pile of uni. Mmmm, I love uni. In the front is a baby daikon, and then the whole thing is garnished with little edible nibbles. He gave us some sheets of toasted nori seaweed and instructed us to wrap the uni in it, then dip lightly in soy. The shrimp and daikon got the ponzu with grated daikon and so on. Personally, I’m not a fan of raw shrimp, and now I know for sure that I just don’t like it all that much: if I didn’t like it at Kichisen, I don’t like it! But the uni was just right: seafood butter with a little texture, and with the dab of soy and the crunchy nori it was spectacular.

Then a hollowed-out yuzu steamed with rice, little dried berries, and tiny fluted potatoes. He encouraged me to photograph it both as presented (with the lid) and opened up. We didn’t quite figure out what the berries were. I thought they might be kuromame, black beans, but he said they were berries and gave the name — which my wife didn’t happen to know off the top of her head. It’s a rather specialized vocabulary, and probably he was using a regional dialect term anyway. They had a very mild taste and a little bit of crunch. The potatoes didn’t taste like all that much, really, but the rice and yuzu combination was warming and friendly after the icy otsukuri. Clearly part of the idea here is an alternation between snow and warmth, giving you the best things of December.

Climax
For me, the climactic moment — the best dish of all — was this cup. Inside was fugu, the much-discussed poison blowfish, covered with chopped thin negi (asatsuki) and a sauce of ponzu and other things I couldn’t quite place. I’d had things flavored with fugu before, but here we really got to taste what it’s like: mild, creamy, and rich. (My wife thinks that this might not have just been regular flesh, but obviously it can't be the liver, as the fugu liver is where the tetrodotoxin is, and if you eat more than a trace amount, you die. I think it can't have been organs of any kind, as I think then you'd have had some trace tetrodotoxin and gotten numb lips, which some fugu crazies enjoy.) In any event, it was extraordinary to me. The texture was reminiscent of uni, but firmer. The flavor was very sweet as fish go, and yet ocean brine-y. The only way I can explain it, I guess, is that this fugu was for me everything otsukuri and sushi really ought to be, but never is.

Back to the snows: crab legs split and served in shaved ice. The little dish in front contained the “mustard,” what the Japanese call the miso, i.e. the liver and fat of the crab. It was mixed with a little soy, dashi, ginger, and a little bit of some kind of citrus juice — I think sudachi, but I wouldn’t swear to it. We discussed this with him, while we drank off the dish — it’s for dipping, but it’s too good to let it go to waste. The usual way to serve cold steamed crab in the West is with something like a mayonnaise, which is nice, but my wife and I agreed that you really need something more acid to cut the richness. This combination was lovely: the richness was from the crab, in the form of its mustard; the acid comes from the citrus; and the whole thing is deepened with the Japanese standards of dashi and a very small amount of soy. The chef mentioned that the crab was from the Japan Sea, not Hokkaido, and that the ginger is Japanese, not imported, both of which make it enormously more expensive; his point wasn't that it was expensive, I think, but that he insists on these ingredients because (a) they're local, and (b) they taste better. [Admittedly, I think he probably thinks "local" and "tastes better" pretty much imply one another, but he wouldn't serve local ingredients that didn't taste good, whatever they cost.]

Back home, I will have to try something like this with lobster or softshell crab. I’ll pass on the soy and dashi, which don’t speak to me the way they do for the Japanese. But instead of just drawn butter and lemon, or mayonnaise, why not use the mustard or tomalley, a small squeeze of seasonal citrus, and then a teeny drop of white wine? Maybe just a whisper of finely-minced shallot too.

Now the next thing was much, much better than I think it had any right to be. Steamed or perhaps poached turnip on top of a little pile of amadai (tilefish, or Japanese branquillo), with grated daikon and minced negi, some gingko nuts, a little ball of mild wasabi on the top, all in a puddle of warm jellied dashi aromatized with toasted rice. Described that way, I would have assumed I’d hate this. But first of all it was made so well, and the flavors balanced so perfectly, that you really couldn’t dislike it. And coming after the snowy crab, once again the little dish of warmth was delightful. I would not want this dish by itself, though I wouldn’t complain, but in this context it was wonderful.

Next up, soba and then tempura. The soba came as you see it: a mound on a little wooden dish, in a basket lined with leaves, with a classic dipping sauce... or so we assumed. We were told that when we’d finished the soba, we’d have tempura with the same sauce. Now I will say that this soba must have been pure buckwheat flour, or nearly so, and was firmer and more flavorful than soba normally is. Other than that, it was mostly a sort of palate-cleanser: going from the squodgy turnip and amadai straight to rich tempura would be problematic.

Then came a basket of freshly-fried tempura, and we picked out equal portions, as you see here. Two shrimp, two quartered shiitake caps, a short stalk of pickled ginger, and a bit of gobo (burdock) stalk. I am not normally a fan of gobo, but this was terrific. And the shrimp were moist and creamy in a way that tempura, even good tempura, normally isn’t. All in all, the best tempura I’ve ever had, though I can’t say I’ve had all that much good stuff.

I was very proud of myself here. As we ate, I kept thinking that there was something odd about the sauce. On the one hand, this was your basic tentsuyu: mirin, dashi, and soy, with grated daikon mixed in. But it was slightly, yet distinctly, spicy. I asked what it was, and the chef said it was daikon. I insisted: what’s making is it spicy? He seemed quite pleased, and told me that it’s not normal daikon but rather karashi-daikon, which is indeed slightly spicy. He also called one of the other chefs in the kitchen to bring him a karashi-daikon to show me. It looked like a small kabu turnip: round, white, and about the size of a small baby’s fist. I think he was pleased because here was a foreigner who could identify the difference between types of daikon even when mixed into tentsuyu. I was, as I say, pretty proud of myself. (Thing is, karashi-daikon I consider a major improvement on regular daikon, having the sweetness of daikon, the sharpness of red radish, and none of that old turnip flavor I associate with daikon and which is why I dislike boiled daikon. I’m going to go looking for karashi-daikon at Nishiki market.)

The last major course was rice and pickles. The pickles were the round "thousand-slice" daikon pickles (senmaizuke) that are a Kyoto winter specialty, plus some preparation of lotus root that I couldn’t place. The rice is apparently this super-fancy rice grown just for him, and he asked if we could tell that it’s so good. I answered, honestly, that I could tell either that it’s extremely good rice or very well made, but beyond that I’m lost; since this rice fitted both descriptions, I’m afraid its spectacular qualities were largely wasted on me. He seemed mollified, though.

Closing Acts
For dessert, this beautiful dish. It’s a California citrus of some kind, which I still can’t place: it’s like a very tart orange with a green peel, but I don’t think it was actually underripe. Perhaps a green grapefruit? Anyway, he’d hollowed it out and made a medium-stiff jelly with the juice, which set back in the shell — no mean trick, this. Over the top, a fine web of lightly-cooked caramel, garnished with a shaving of caramelized peel. The sauce was, I think, dark-caramelized sugar, citrus juice, and just enough water (I’d guess) to keep it fairly thin. You put the web on the jelly, pour sauce over the top, and then dig in with a spoon.

Of course, because this was garnished with snow again, and was quite bitter-sour, we finished it up thinking, “hmm, kind of cold and bitter here.” So on came the second dessert: zensai, as they call it here. Red beans and mochi simmering in a little cup.

It came like this, with a lid on, and under it you can see the actual dessert.

In the bottom was a little mound of hot charcoal, which kept the mixture bubbling and very close to too hot to eat. My wife actually burned her tongue a bit, but she’s kind of a klutz that way.

I didn’t get photographs here, but we had another demonstration of the brilliance of kaiseki at its best. We’d finished the citrus thinking we wanted something hot and sweet, and we got it — but it was too hot, and too sweet. So what then? Well, then came bowls with a small amount of macha, powdered green tea, which is extremely bitter because you’re actually drinking the leaves as well as their infusion. Wonderful... but now kind of bitter in the mouth, albeit warm? Oh, yes, then came just a little mild tea to finish up. So each time you finished one thing, it took you just a bit too far in one direction, and then you got something that met this need but pushed a little too far in another direction, and so on. Fantastic, honestly.

The Chef's Table
While we drank our final tea, the chef chatted with us. As we’d long since realized, this burly man in the white gi was the chef, Tanigawa Yoshimi. The guy who beat Morimoto hollow on Iron Chef. The guy who seems to be one of the architects of the kyo-ryori movement against the over-elegance of kaiseki as such. (As I understand it, the point is that Tanigawa thinks much of kaiseki has lost touch with the rustic elegance that was so central for Sen no Rikyu’s chanoyu; it’s become sophisticated in a more urban, courtly style. His kyo-ryori emphasizes a greater simplicity, but as you can see, that’s not “down-home cooking” or anything like that, just a renovation of the aesthetic.) In any event, the guy who mopped my wife’s dish when she slopped on it (told you she’s a bit of a klutz!) was one of the most celebrated chefs in this whole cuisine.

You may recall that Chef Murata served us most of our food at Roan Kikunoi, and now Chef Tanigawa served us at Kichisen. This isn’t because we’re special: that’s how kaiseki (or kyo-ryori) works. Murata was less attentive, because he had three parties at the bar; Tanigawa was with us almost the entire time, though he didn’t stand over us, because we were alone at the bar.

By way of contrast, my wife gave me this link to an article in the New York Times. It's about a new fad, dining at the "chef's table." The idea is that when you go to some place like Craft or Blue Ginger or wherever, a place where the chef is more or less a celebrity (as Tom Colicchio and Ming Tsai are, at these restaurants), they actually cook your food. That's right, if you make a reservation weeks and weeks in advance, and pay extra, you too can have the special exclusive experience of having the chef of a fancy restaurant actually cook. Isn't that grand? The NYT reviewer seems underwhelmed by the cooking, but he doesn't criticize the concept.

Thing is, this is absolutely normal in kaiseki. If you go to Tanigawa's restaurant, or Murata's, you know that they're cooking. Where else would they be? Not that Tanigawa made every part of every dish we ate -- far from it. But every bit was done under his watchful eye, finished by his hands or with him standing over (and possibly yelling at) the guy doing the finishing, and served to us from his hands (actually two things were served by apprentices, but Tanigawa was a constant presence). And this isn't because we're special: that's how this cuisine is done.

In this situation, Chef Tanigawa really could have gotten away with murder: he could have tried to impress us with his wonderfulness, or awe us, or whatever. But that's contrary to the aesthetics he believes in. He wants us to eat and enjoy, and he works very hard indeed to make that happen -- but the hard part of that work is hidden, so as not to disturb us. He wants to entertain us, but he makes minimal use of his celebrity to do it. He did mention the Iron Chef thing, but actually the point was that it gave him an opportunity to ensure that we went home with a copy of the DVD of the show. He also put in a box of his own chirimen, in this case chewy little teeny semi-dry fish seasoned strongly with sansho. Why? Well, you want your guests to leave without that feeling that it's all just over, the sort of post-dining letdown, so you give them some gifties. The fact that he's a culinary celebrity helps him to do this, but it's not something he made a big deal about. My wife asked him, "What was doing Iron Chef like?" His complete response: "Shindoi" (tiring). As to Murata, whose book is apparently something of a sensation among Western cooks lately, and is on TV a lot, and so on -- he just never mentioned any of this, nor in fact made it clear who he was.

There's a kind of high elegance to that. You're being served dinner by a famous celebrity chef, but he's too busy focusing on you and your meal to make a fuss about himself. You're what matters, not him. Isn't that how it should be?

Conclusion
My conclusion? I really like kaiseki, kyo-ryori, whatever. It’s brilliant, elegant, sophisticated, and just beautifully constructed to produce a fabulous dining experience. Perhaps most importantly, it is completely unpretentious. No arrogance, superiority, or whatever. He just did what he did, and wanted us to enjoy it as best we could, and his explanations and so forth were clearly aimed at helping us get more out of it. But I don’t think he thought we needed helping along: he’d have done the same thing with any diners who seemed interested, pitched to the appropriate level.

So, after perhaps the best meal of my life, I find myself wondering: could kaiseki be done outside Japan? Arguably it doesn’t really exist outside the Kyoto area, but that’s not what I mean. I mean, could the whole approach, the conception of the cuisine, be reformulated elsewhere? At some point I’ll jabber about that here on this blog — you’ll be the first to be truly bored by it!

Seven Lucky Gods

2008-12-15T16:33:00.006+09:00

I got a chance to try another place for tantan men today. Unfortunately, it was very cold this morning, so I switched coats, and the result is that I didn’t have my camera. Argh. Oh well, the internet is a wonderful thing.

Today was Seven Lucky Gods (七福神), at the northeast corner of Horikawa-Oike. It’s a classic ramen joint: long counter, a couple of tables, open kitchen, and so on. Their specialties are a fish-broth ramen and their Ninth Street Scallion Tantan Men (kyujo-negi tantan men 九条ねぎ坦々麺).

Sam had miso ramen with roasted pork (chashu) and medium-boiled eggs, no negi. I ordered a batch of gyoza. And, of course, I had the tantan men.

The Rundown
All in all, a satisfying if rather strange approach to this dish. Here's a photo I found on-line (fortunately, all Japanese are apparently trained from the cradle to photograph their food and post it for public discussion):
The stock was strong and effective, with a definite pork flavor. The noodles were just about right in terms of richness, egg flavor, and bounce. And of course the 9th Street Scallions were good: that’s one of the kyo-yasai, the special Kyoto vegetables everyone’s on about these days.

But otherwise, the dish was very odd.

No ground pork topping: roasted pork instead. Minimal sesame flavor. A lot of togarashi (red chile), and very little rayu (spicy chile oil). No Sichuan peppercorn. And I’m pretty sure there was some sweet miso in there as well.

What's really peculiar is that the sign says that the kyujo-negi are certified to be really kyujo-negi by the Kyoto Agricultural Council, and that the rayu is special stuff from 山田油店, which appears to be in Saitama, north of Tokyo. But having made this production about it, there wasn't actually all that much negi and there sure as heck wasn't a lot of rayu.

By The Way
Sam adored his miso ramen. He’s no great judge, but certainly he was down on Ginza Shisen, as was I. I thought it was good miso ramen, but I admit I don’t have a whole lot of experience with that dish. This looks a good deal like what he ate -- again, an image I found on-line.

The bowlful Sam ate was a little different, in that it had no negi: Sam hates negi, and in fact all types of onions, in every form we have yet tried. And he has a surprising ability to detect them lurking behind other flavors, whatever they might look like.

The gyoza were classic Japanese gyoza: thin, under-flavored, thin-skinned. Not excellent, as they lacked the crunchy brownness of perfect gyoza. But well made, with none of the peculiar off cabbage flavors of Ginza Shisen. One thing I thought odd was the sauce with which they served these gyoza, which I couldn’t place at all (although eating tantanmen at the same time makes it a little difficult to identify subtle things without pretty strong cues).

I would bet that their fish ramen, and their more basic ramen offerings, would be good.

Assessment
In essence, this is tantanmen as another form of ramen, an approach I think is perfectly legitimate but which I’ve never seen taken to this extreme. The only way in which this bowl differed from any other miso ramen was in the replacement of sesame paste for some of the miso, and the admixture of some spicy stuff (togarashi and, according to the sign at least, rayu).

I would definitely recommend this to someone who’s a big fan of miso ramen and is looking for something a little different. As tantanmen per se, however, it’s very peculiar.

All of which makes it difficult to rate this entry.

As a dish, assessed on its own merits, I give it a 6/10: solid, tasty, well executed, but nothing spectacular.

As tantanmen, assessed with reference to that dish, I give it a 5/10: very tasty, but so outside the normal range that it gets some demerits.

I now think I should have rated Ginza Shisen lower, but them's the breaks.

Tantan Men: Preliminary Tasting

2008-12-10T17:39:00.003+09:00

My passing remark about how I intend to do a comparison tasting of a lot of different bowls of tantanmen in Kyoto has already prompted some slavering comments, so let’s get cracking.

Before the tasting begins, though, let’s consider what tantan men actually is.

Origins: Dan Dan Mian

This is a Sichuan dish that is, at base, extremely simple. Take hot, fresh egg noodles. Toss with lots of chopped scallion, chili sauce (doubanjiang, for example), soy sauce, chili oil (la-yu), sesame paste, and usually some ground-up Sichuan peppercorns. Often some pickled vegetables are added. Carry it to work in a lunchbox, where the residual heat will bring out the flavors.

Made this way, the dish is a marvelous demonstration of the Sichuan penchant for simple, rustic, yet deep and complex dishes. Every major flavor is here: sweet (sesame paste), sour (in the sauce), salty (soy), bitter (raw scallion). In addition, you have two contested flavors: spicy (chilies) and fatty (sesame and oil). Depending on how the ingredients are prepared, there may also be more or less umami or savory, the famous “fifth flavor.”

And yet, there is nothing additional, no gilding, no tricks. The dish is at base as subtle as an axe. But made well, it’s a dish fit for a peasant or a king.

You will often see it said that there must be ground or minced pork in the dish, and while this is now usual, it is certainly a deviation from its peasant origins. After all, meat of any kind was long a rarity for Chinese peasants, and everything else about the dish bespeaks peasant simplicity. For the same reason, it is very unlikely that the dish would be served in soup, soup being again a delicacy requiring expensive ingredients, time, and cooking fuel.

Japanese Adaptation: Tan Tan Men

I have seen it suggested that tantan men was invented by the “father of Sichuan cuisine” in Japan, Chen Kenichi, who later turned up as Iron Chef Chinese on the original Japanese Iron Chef show. In this account, Chen took a sort of vaguely gourmet version of dandanmian — with the pork, for instance — and made it into ramen-like soup noodles.

Whether this story is actually true or not, certainly the Japanese version is precisely thus. Instead of a sauce, there is a soup consisting of a pork broth (or sometimes chicken, or both) flavored with sesame paste, chili sauce, soy, and chili oil (rayu). Noodles are added, and then topped with minced pork, chopped scallions, sesame seeds, and some kind of vegetable — usually bok choy (chingensai), usually not pickled. In some cases, black sesame (paste and seeds) may be used in place of the usual white. More chili oil is commonly added as a pretty red garnish.

Now I like both the Sichuan version and the Japanese one, and a number of the many variations on the theme that I’ve tried. So, as noted in an earlier post, I have decided that it is my bounden duty to try a ridiculous number of different restaurants’ offerings of tantan men and tell you what I think of them, ultimately leading to a sort of guide.

To my mind, this makes more sense than a guide to ramen in Kyoto. I mean, ramen is all very well, but first of all, which style of ramen? And second, ramen is much too Japanese for me, and never nearly spicy or complicated enough. It’s fine, I guess, but my palate lies much closer to Sichuan and Hunan.

Before finally getting on to specific examples, let’s run through the four basics:

Stock — normally pork or pork-and-chicken. You should be able to tell.
Flavor Base — sesame, chili sauce, soy, and usually chili oil
Noodles — bouncy egg noodles, as in ramen
Topping — minced pork cooked with garlic, ginger, and Sichuan peppercorns until caramelized; green vegetable, pickled or otherwise, usually bok choy; chopped scallion; often sesame seeds; sometimes toasted whole dry chilies and/or toasted Sichuan peppercorns; often a drizzle of chili oil

Each of these basic four components should stand up for itself and be worth eating.

So without further ado....

Ginza Shisen (銀座四川)

In the Porta underground shopping arcade, by Kyoto Station. Here is a Japanese website with links and some reviews and such, giving it an overall 5 out of 5: high marks indeed!

Just goes to show you what trust you can put in websites like that. All told, a pretty mediocre bowl, but so typical that I’ll use it as a first basic discussion.

Stock: Weak, thin, and lacking character. I’d guess it was pork stock, but it tasted mostly of salt. No depth of flavor to stand up to the other ingredients.

Flavor Base: Somebody tell these guys about chili sauce (doubanjiang), because apparently they forgot it. Thus the flavoring was sweet and rich, and rather salty, but lacked both the fire and the complex sourness of chili sauce. As a result it seemed, again, thin and lacking character.

Noodles: Respectable ramen noodles, but a little too eggy for my taste. This would have been perfect for the dish, actually, if the other things had stood up to it — if your noodles are too light they ought to be overpowered.

Toppings: Minced pork appeared to be simply stir-fried without any significant flavoring, and certainly wasn’t caramelized; bok choy was respectable; minimal scallion; no sesame seeds; and finally a couple drops of chili oil off to the side as a sort of ironic comment on the lack of flavor here. No hint of Sichuan peppercorns anywhere.

The thing is, I’d currently give this about a 4 out of 10. From what I’ve said, it sounds like I’d give it a right panning, but in fact, it was well within the average range of tantan men as I’ve had it in Kyoto. Weak, thin, low on flavor, poorly balanced, and basically lacking depth or force... but that’s the way most Japanese seem to like it. Sichuan peppercorns are rare indeed, which means that the dish usually lacks the numbing-spicy special flavor that is distinctive to Sichuan.

Which, in fact, is precisely why I’m doing this little quest. I want to find tantan men made the way I think it should be, not the way they do. I mean, of all people to get Sichuan food wrong, I’d put the Japanese and the English at the top of the list: they don’t like hot spices, garlic, or robust and even brutal flavors. (Let’s not talk about what they call “curry,” okay? The really spicy-hot curries are worse, actually, because they’re just hot with no depth.)

To conclude, I noticed on the way out that more or less next to Ginza Shisen is another place that serves tantanmen, so pretty soon it’s back to Porta for another bowl.

As time goes by (sing with me!), I will post more reviews, and I will also progressively refine my own secret recipe. Ultimately I hope to develop a recipe that is as good as any in Kyoto. And if I can’t, I hope it’s because I’ve found some truly killer tantanmen.

Steamed Custard Kabocha

2008-12-06T23:28:00.004+09:00

I stumbled on the blog No Recipes, and saw this lovely post on a custard-stuffed steamed kabocha squash. Kabocha is in season here, and this looked like just the thing for the oven-challenged. 'Course he made his by steaming in a pot in an oven, but I figured I could just modify it for a pot. I won't give a recipe, because he gives one and I don't want to steal his thunder. Here's his picture (nicer than mine).

I also thought I should modify the flavorings. He uses things like cardamom and nutmeg, but for me it made more sense to use ginger and yuzu peel. (Incidentally, that don't look like a kabocha to me, but whatever.)

Now, I did have some minor trouble finding condensed milk, but it wasn't all that tricky -- I just stopped fooling around and went to Daimaru, the department store a few blocks from home. Expensive, but they had what I wanted.

My main problem was that steaming in a pot didn't work as smoothly as I'd expected. It took quite a while before the custard really seemed to be set -- nearly 90 minutes, in fact -- by which point the kabocha was rather saggy. Held up, though, as kabocha are pretty tough. I expect I did it too hot or too cool. But I am also thinking of a thing Diana Kennedy does with a whole Gouda cheese (which is a ball), where she has you wrap it firmly in a smooth kitchen towel before steaming, and I wonder whether that might be the way to go here.

I do think it's something of a pity that the custard absorbs into the squash as you go, because this means that the upper part of the squash is a bit dry and bland, although on the other hand the bottom half or so is amazingly good. Next time I might try mucking about to get some kind of layering effect. Certainly I'm going to do some research on steaming a whole stuffed squash!

Here's my version -- just a slice, I'm afraid:

As you see, the end-result was very pretty, and it sure tasted great. Sam pretty much passed on the pumpkin part (excessive alliteration!), but scarfed down the custard.

Lovely Chinese Lunch

2008-12-05T13:07:00.004+09:00

I’m starting to work on an entry about Tan Tan Men (淡々面), the Japanese version of the classic Sichuan dish Dan Dan Mian. It’s a spicy bowl of noodles I love in both forms, and just about every semi-Chinese place has them at lunchtime. So I’m going around cataloguing, trying bowl after bowl of noodles, taking pictures, and so on.

But I just had to share this place.

I had some trouble finding these characters, partly because they’re so stylized in the sign, but I think this place is called Sen Gō Kan (膳豪漢). A local on-line restaurant place gives the characters as 膳處漢, but I think they're misreading the middle character -- at any rate, that's not what this sign says. Admittedly, I also think I've got the middle character wrong, but it appears to be extremely obscure and I don't have really good dictionaries to hand. On the other hand, Google maps and such do give the other version. I don't care, the noren has different characters, so there. Anyway, it’s on Nishikikōji-dōri, between Muromachi-dōri and Shinmachi-dōri.

The first time we went there, I had black sesame Tan Tan Men, and my wife had the dim sum set lunch. Both were wonderful. But just when my wife was feeling pretty full, they came in and gave her one more thing: a bowl of shark’s fin noodle soup. This seemed like overkill, but it looked great, and she had a little, and I tasted it... And then the waiter comes zipping back in all apologetic: this wasn’t supposed to come with the set lunch, but was ordered by another table. My wife is equally apologetic: it’s fine if they take it, but they ought to know we’ve tasted it already. The waiter looks pretty worried, and goes off. He comes back with the manager, who says, “no, don’t worry, just eat it. No problem.” So we had a gourmet extra!

Now since then, I’ve gone back by myself several times. I always think maybe I’ll try something else, but then I can’t resist the black sesame noodles, which look like this:

This time, I also ordered gyoza. I happened to notice that they come in two plate sizes: 3 dumplings or 6. This is odd, because usually they come about 5 or so to an order, and the price isn’t spectacularly low. So I figure, what the hey? And when they arrive, I see why:

These things are huge! Unfortunately, they do have that thin skin the Japanese like, where I like them a little more robust, but at least these ones weren’t the ultra-thin paper-skinned ones that I think are silly.

Anyway, I just had to show you my lunch.

Thanksgiving

2008-11-27T21:09:00.002+09:00

I realize I haven’t posted in a while, mostly because I’ve been lazy and haven’t been cooking much that’s interesting — and I haven’t been bringing my camera to restaurants either, sorry to say. But this is Thanksgiving, so it’s time for a good old-fashioned meal.

Unfortunately, I dislike turkey, and what’s more I don’t have an oven to roast it in anyway. So I decided to do old-fashioned Japanese-style late autumn food, with a Thanksgiving twist.

For the bird, duck, which is a big deal in Kyoto. The main river here is the Kamogawa, which means Duck River, so you can already tell they’re into this. Mashed squash, which around here is kabocha. For a sweet-and-sour fruit thing, à la cranberry sauce, I found a nice-looking recipe for a persimmon with vinegared fruit and vegetables inside. And then, because it’s Japan, I figured I’d do some soy-glazed sardines (the fresh kind, not the ones in cans).

Miso
Now the first step was to get some miso. The recipe I had for duck involves grilling duck in a complex miso glaze on top of a magnolia leaf — a very old-fashioned preparation called hoba-yaki (hoba means “magnolia leaf,” and yaki means “grilled”). But the recipe was also pretty specific about which misos to use, and that meant a little hike.

Acting on a tip from the Kyoto Foodies, I hiked up to Honda Miso (no relation to the cars, I think), which is at Muromachi-Ichijo, just southwest of Karasuma-Imadegawa, for those in town. As you can see, I had something of an embarrassment of riches here: too much to choose. Fortunately I knew what I wanted, and asked, and was handed three packages of miso: white Saikyo miso, near-black sakura miso, and a red-brown kōji miso.

I now have nine kinds of miso in my fridge, and must start experimenting rather more vigorously or I’ll never get through it all.

Nishiki
Then it’s off to Nishiki Market to get the rest. Clockwise from the top right golden box: sake, katsuo bushi (fresh-shaved bonito flakes), negi scallion-leek, yuzu (yellow at this time of year), mitsuba, daikon, red carrot (a big deal locally), ginger, sesame seeds, sliced inexpensive matsutake mushrooms, duck breast, sardines (in the bag), chestnuts (below the sardines), persimmons, half a kabocha squash, magnolia leaves (in the very back).

The magnolia leaves were tricky, but fun. I asked at every vegetable stand, and was told they didn’t have it. At one place, a guy about my age didn’t even know what this was, and I explained it was for hoba yaki (or hoba miso), and he still didn’t understand. He was about to start apologizing politely to the nice foreigner who’s using bad Japanese and terms that don’t mean anything, but then his father steps in. I couldn’t follow all of it, between my minimal Japanese and the thick Kyoto accent of the father, but it was pretty clear:

Father: He wants hoba leaves, for hoba yaki.
Son: What are you talking about?
Father: You’ve never had hoba yaki?
Son: Um, no, what is it?
Father: You’ve never had hoba yaki? What the hell?
Son: Dad, what are you on about?
Father: I can’t believe you’ve never had hoba yaki! I mean, no, we don’t have the leaves, but it’s a great idea for a day like this, and you’ve never even had it? I can’t believe it.
Son: Oy ve, here we go again.

Okay, something like that.

Eventually I go to yet another place and ask, and the dour-faced woman says something totally incomprehensible to me. I apologize. Impatiently, she repeats it, slowly. I apologize. She stalks to the back, argues with an old man (her husband?), and disappears. She returns with a flat package containing 10 frozen magnolia leaves. Now it’s clear: she’s saying that (a) they’re frozen, and (b) they come 10 to a package, and is that okay? I agree, sweating a little, because I’m worried this is going to cost me. Still irritated, she demands the money: 500 yen. $5 and change. Er, okay lady, sure. $5? Hell yes. I pay and depart, still wondering what her problem is. Oh well.

The duck was pricey. Everything else was pretty cheap. So all in all, it came out fine.

Oh, and all that miso? $15 even.

Making Dinner
So after picking up Sam at nursery school and waiting interminably for a late bus, I’m a little behind and have to work quick and clean. I also ding myself on the corner of my petty knife, which is annoying because (a) it slows me down and (b) it’s so sharp that the cut bleeds like hell. I ask Sam to get me some toilet paper to wrap around it after I wash, because every time I lift my hand it’s dripping blood, and he very slowly and carefully gets me two sheets. One of them ripped in half. Can you spare it, kid? Anyway, I manage.

The slow stuff at the start I photographed assiduously, and I was planning to keep doing it right through the meal. But then crunch-time hit, the kids were being bonkers, and photos stopped happening. I don’t know how other food-bloggers do it. Do they make everything in advance? Or just make one dish at a time? Or do they get a friend or spouse or somebody to take photos while they’re cooking? If I’ve got three burners going and am cutting and finishing all at once, photos are just not on the cards. Still I’ve got something for show-and-tell.

The first thing after making dashi was to make tosa-zu, which is a special kind of vinegar for light pickling dishes. Unlike regular vinegar, you’ll be happy to eat this. Basically what you do is you mix vinegar, soy, sugar, and dashi, heat it almost to a boil, and then throw in katsuo bushi flakes and shut off the heat. When it’s cool, you strain it. It tastes fabulous, I don’t know why.

Next, I peeled and diced my half-kabocha, which incidentally is not a small thing to do. Raw kabocha is so hard that if you cut it with a traditional Japanese vegetable knife, you can break the blade. So you use a big honking thing called a deba, which fortunately I have. But it’s still work. I heaved this in a big pot, covered it with water, and left it alone for later, when I boiled it until very tender, drained, mashed the hell out of it, added... well, I’ll get back to that.

I cut nice even rectangles of red carrot (a local specialty) and daikon radish, and dropped them in a bowl of very salty water to pickle lightly for later.

I also put my cleaned sardines in salt water for later, to draw out the fishiness.

Then I blanched the mitsuba and cut the stems in 1.5 cm lengths.

And I peeled and simmered the chestnuts. Now this turned out to be much more irritating than I’d expected. I knew that Julia Child says to cut off a 1/8-inch strip of the shell, drop them in cold water, bring to a rapid boil, boil 1 minute, and then dip them out and shell. Sure, but the inner shell doesn’t come off for love or money. I found in the end that the best way is to shave it off with a very sharp little knife. (No, this isn’t how I cut myself.) But it took a while. Then I dropped them in a simmering liquid and started simmering. I cooked them 15 minutes, found them hard, and needed the burner. So I put them in the microwave in the liquid and nuked them on low power for 15 minutes, covered. Later on, it turned out they were still rather hard for my taste. Then again, I don’t much like chestnuts to begin with. Oh well.

After that, crunch time came, so no more photos till the end. Here’s what happened, more or less simultaneously:

1. Score the duck skin in a diamond pattern and cook gently over medium heat, skin down, until just golden, rendering out most of the excess fat. Put the duck to one side, and the fat to another.

2. Boil the hell out of the kabocha, 25 minutes, until super-tender, then drain and mash with butter, fatty milk, and the rendered duck fat (yum!).

3. Mix up a combination of sakura miso, Saikyo white miso, sake, egg yolk, and sesame paste, and cook it over low heat, stirring constantly, for 15 minutes, until quite thick. Reserve.

4. Slice the duck on the bias and keep aside.

5. Soak two magnolia leaves.

6. Hollow out 3 persimmons, discover that they’re a bit unripe and full of hard seeds, peel and slice a fourth in neat rectangles. Put these rectangles, the mitsuba stem pieces, and the drained carrot and daikon rectangles in a mixture of the tosa-zu, fresh-ground sesame seeds, mirin sweet cooking wine, and soy. Let soak a while, then portion into the hollowed-out persimmons.

7. Put the sardines in a little hot oil to brown on one side along with a lot of sliced ginger, then turn over, cook briefly, and add half a cup of cheap sake. Put a lid over it sitting on the bottom of the pan, cook until the sake is reduced by half, then add a few Tb soy sauce and cook uncovered until the sauce is thick and sticky. Put the sardines on a plate and pour the sauce and ginger over the top. (I got this recipe from the Kyoto Foodies again.)

8. Put a soaked magnolia leaf on my brilliant wire-mesh grill thingy, cover with a big dollop of the miso mixture, add a couple of chestnuts, and top with several slices of duck and a pinch of julienned negi scallion white. Turn on the burner and wait.

9. Cut carrot and onion fine, cook with butter, add half the matsutake cut in small chunks, cook until browning, add a bunch of water, cook until thickening, add the remaining matsutake, cook until just done, season to taste, serve.

So there you have it: Thanksgiving dinner.

The Results — The Envelope Please...
The persimmon thing was spectacular. Also easy. I will do this again. My wife had two and could have had more.

The mushrooms were lovely: fragrant, tender, and just right. A quiet, mild dish that I thought sat nicely next to exciting things like the persimmon and duck.

The duck thing is excellent, but tricky. You’re supposed to cook it on a grill that sits at the table, which I don’t have, and when you move the leaf the miso thickens unpleasantly. The duck has to be absolutely paper-thin, too, or it overcooks on one side while remaining blood-rare on the other. This technique is very simple, but it’s not as simple as it looks. I will experiment with it, without the duck, until I get it right: just mushrooms and miso is pretty wonderful. The thing is, the miso gets this roasted, smoky taste going on, and also it caramelizes a bit. I still don’t like chestnuts very much, despite the effort, and I won’t put that effort in again.

The sardine thing is very good, but overpowered by everything else here. I’d do it again, though, especially given how cheap it was (200 yen for 6 sardines is pretty impressively cheap). No, that's not a magnolia leaf as far as I know, it's just something Sam decided he had to bring home from nursery school.

The mashed squash was lovely but rather bland. But that was the point, after all. The hint of duck from the fat was certainly a good thing, but it was mostly a kind of background minor dish.

Dessert was supposed to be cake, which I bought and had on hand, but everybody was far too full, so we’ll have it tomorrow.

Ryugetsudo Coffee Shop (柳月堂)

2008-10-21T21:21:00.004+09:00

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been wandering around looking for a good coffee shop. There are a zillion coffee shops in Kyoto, in wildly varying styles, prices, and quality. So I’ve been looking for a good one to spend several hours reading. (I’m an academic, and I’m supposed to be on sabbatical doing some research as well as enjoying myself, after all.)

After trying a bunch, I have found that I have pretty specific requirements. I used to not care much, but I guess I’m getting old. These days I want the coffee to be decent, though I’m not a nut about this. I want a quiet atmosphere, comfortable chairs, music I like or at least don’t really hate (preferably not with singing in English, which breaks into my concentration), and no great sense of pressure to order something or give up the table. Oddly enough, I have found a great many that meet every requirement except the music: usually you get your pick of J-pop, muzak, various irritating styles of mediocre American pop, or every now and again a place with a huge range that plays it all randomly. But I have also increasingly found that it is the music that makes a place impossible: for example, I found one place that is very nice in most respects, except that they play continuous 1950s American doo-wop sort of stuff, and after an hour I feel like my brain has been blenderized.

So, with some reservations, I decided to check out Ryugetsudo, an old coffee shop founded in 1953 as a sort of temple to European “classical” music.

Rules Of Sound
The first thing you have to know is that this place has definite rules. No talking, no cellphones, no typing, no anything that could disturb people listening. If you buy a pastry at the bakery downstairs, you may eat it, but you must unwrap it in the hallway before you enter the main room. Everything is organized around the music.

This is also true visually. All the seating is arranged in rows facing a low dais with a piano, above which, to left and right, are large speakers made more attractive by some beautiful wooden things that spread the sound. Along one side are a lot of books and the huge record collection (records, as in vinyl, if you even know what that means any more!), and the books are basically reference works about music: work catalogues of major composers, reference works on opera, and so on.

If you wish, you may sit at a table in the back and pore through the four-volume handwritten catalogue in binders, organized A-Z by composer for three volumes, plus one volume for nothing but Mozart and Beethoven. Having found something you’d like to hear, you write the disc number and the album title (in Japanese katakana transcription) on the next open line in the music-paper notebook that sits open, and when they’ve played through to your selection you’ll hear it.

I said I had reservations, right? First of all, it’s quite a hike for me, up by Imadegawa Eiden train station, north of Kyoto University. No big deal, really, but irritating. Second, it’s expensive: you pay a “seat charge” of 500¥, so that your first cup of coffee is 500¥+550¥ = $10.50. If you have more coffee, the price per cup drops because you don't keep paying the seat charge, but that’s still an awful lot in my opinion. Third, I kind of get the heebie-jeebies about this kind of “temple of high art” stuff.

Anyway, I went.

Entering The Temple

My first reaction was that the room itself is surprisingly comfortable and pleasantly studious. Most of the customers were men, which amazed me; over the course of a few hours I began to realize that most of them must be Kyodai faculty: what other group of middle-aged men in suits would sit in a classical music coffee shop for two hours on a weekday afternoon reading a book? And there aren’t a lot of women, I presume because (a) they can’t talk to each other, which is what women do at coffee shops here and probably everywhere, and (b) there aren’t almost any Kyodai faculty women, which is a disgrace. I will say that walking in and hearing a warm, vibrant recording of a Mozart piano concerto was no bad thing either.

My next reaction was amused enjoyment of the service staff. They are all passably pretty young women, and they wear very soft shoes (to dampen noise), tidy white blouses with black v-neck sweaters, and pleated black skirts. They look, in fact, sort of like Japanese schoolgirls grown up and wearing a young woman’s version of the same uniform. They bring coffee and water, put it down silently, bob a curtsey, and disappear silently. Nice! (Another reason, I suspect, why the clientele is primarily male: this kind of service is not especially unusual in Japan, but when combined with monastic silence it feels slightly servile in a way that is not unpleasant for a middle-aged man like me, pleasant probably for many of them, and may perhaps feel odd for younger men and for women in general. Just a guess.) The fact that they are all young and fairly pretty makes me a little suspicious that the management are deliberately aiming at their audience, but I’m not really going to argue about it: they're not ogled or harassed or anything.

My third reaction was confusion. I decided, you see, that I should take a look at the big catalogue, because I figured this was probably a pretty good place to hear Tōru Takemitsu’s music. Takemitsu (武満徹) was the dean of Japanese composers working in a more or less “classical” idiom. So I flip through, and there he is: one work, the Requiem for String Orchestra of 1957. Eh? This predates all his really major compositions, his leap to fame and importance in the international music scene, and all that. And he was quite prolific, too! Nothing else? And how come this hand-written catalogue still lists his dates as 1930–, when he in fact died in 1996; does this mean that nobody has called for the work in more than ten years?

This led to my fourth reaction: a mild disillusionment that coincided perfectly with my reservations about a temple to music. With a sinking heart, I turned through the pages. Yes: not a single entry for Schoenberg, Berg, Webern. Only three entries for Stravinsky. The holdout late-Romantic tonalist Sibelius, yes, some, but almost none of the only slightly more radical Richard Strauss. Lots of Shostakovich, that overrated Stalinist reactionary composer. In other words, this isn’t a temple to music, but a temple to everything Theodor Adorno described in a famous essay called “On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening” (“Über den Fetischcharakter in der Musik und die Regression des Hörens,” 1938). All that might disturb the beautiful surfaces of the music is removed, and along with it any remaining possibility that this same beautiful music might actually challenge, disturb, shake the listeners.

Planning Pilgrimages
For all that, it’s a lovely place to sit and read Adorno on music. He would, I think, have thought this delightfully ironic, and after all he was never one to pass up the opportunity to listen to Beethoven and Mozart. I plan to spend a lot of time here, reading and listening, because despite its imperfections it is far and away the closest approach to my ideal that I have yet seen. (It also helps that if you plan to come often, you can buy a book of tickets for seat+coffee, reducing the price as much as 25% for that first cup.)

But next time I’m there for a few hours, I’m putting on Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge. That'll show 'em.

Mostly Matsutake

2008-10-13T22:28:00.003+09:00

Inspired by this post at KyotoFoodie, I decided to try matsutake mushrooms in season. The season is short, the mushrooms are much loved across Japan, and I thought I’d better try them now before I lose my chance.

Matsutake are also very, very expensive. I searched up and down at Nishiki market for what I wanted: two good mushrooms. They normally come packaged at least four or five at a time, which is too many to use all at once first time out. I was a little startled: I knew they could be expensive, but this is outrageous! Here, dead center, you can see a box (the one with a very fat mushroom, just above the blank space) marked at 15 man, which is to say 150,000¥, or $1,500.

Okay, given what's going on in the world economy, what kind of maniac shells out $1500 for a box of mushrooms? Fortunately, you don't have to get that crazy, and I had no intention of doing so. At the same time, I didn’t want el-cheapo ones: if you’re going to have them, you want them to be decent enough that you get the flavor. In the end, I settled on a cute little box of two for a little under $30 total. Here they are:

Now what you make with these things, mostly, is either matsutake gohan (matsutake rice) or matsutake dobin mushi (matsutake steamed in a teapot). But if you’re only serving two plus a toddler, two mushrooms is a lot for either of these. So I decided to make both: neither is at all difficult, technically.

But that might get repetitive, so I decided to get interesting. From a blog entry I spotted about somebody’s dinner at a Kyoto kaiseki place, I worked out how to make a fig dengaku, which is fig with a sweet miso sauce.

Not difficult, actually, and apart from the screaming baby and mildly misbehaving toddler, it was an extremely nice meal. I don’t think I’m going to drop thirty bucks on matsutake any time soon (to say nothing of thousands!), but other than that these were very repeatable dishes, worth working on.

Matsutake Dobin Mushi
What you’re supposed to do is put chunks of matsutake into little individual teapots along with some protein (usually chicken thigh, shrimp, duck, or hamo eel) and a sake-flavored dashi stock. Then you steam the teapots for ten minutes or so. To serve, you give each person his own teapot, and put a little cup on top with a half sudachi lime. People pour the soup in the cup, squeeze sudachi on, and drink the soup and eat the chunks out of the pot.

I decided it wasn’t worth buying these little pots for a one-time thing. If we decided we adored the dish, we’d want decent pots, but it’d be crazy to buy these if we decided it was just sort of okay. So I steamed the stuff in tall teacups covered with plastic wrap, which works fine but doesn’t look as nice.

For protein, I used hamo (pike conger eel), which is sort of ubiquitous in Kyoto from late summer into autumn. You buy this pre-prepared: to make it yourself, you need a special knife and a hell of a lot of skill, and you end up with a huge amount of eel that doesn’t keep especially well, and what’s more the prepared stuff isn’t expensive.

To make 3 medium-small servings, you need 3 cups of dashi, 1 Tb soy sauce, 2 Tb mirin (sweet rice wine), 1 Tb salt, 1 matsutake mushroom, and 6 chunks of your protein, plus 3 sudachi halves (fat lime or yuzu wedges would work fine too). Combine the dashi, soy, mirin, and salt, and bring to a strong simmer. Brush (don’t wash) the matsutake and cut in half crosswise, then tear it into fat shreds with your fingers (it divides easily). Divide the mushroom pieces and meat evenly into 3 big teacups or medium coffee mugs. Prepare a steamer: I put a steamer rack in the bottom of a big pot and added water to come just a little below the rack, then bring it to a boil over high heat. Divide the hot soup across the mugs, then seal tight with plastic wrap. Carefully place them in the steamer and put on the lid. Steam over medium-high heat for ten minutes or so. Turn off heat, open the lid away from you to dissipate the steam, and very carefully remove the cups. To serve, peel off the plastic at the table (the steam smells wonderful), and have people eat the soup and the chunks with a squeeze or so of the sour citrus to taste.

I found that this dish tastes quite nice but overrated. I was expecting a powerful fragrance reminiscent of earth, as with morels or truffles. Instead, matsutake are woodsy and surprisingly subtle. I suppose you could say that a morel is to a truffle as a shiitake is to a matsutake. I generally prefer dried shiitake to fresh, because the latter strike me as having more texture than flavor, and the drying process intensifies the flavor effectively without unduly damaging the texture. So maybe it’s just that matsutake aren’t my thing?

I’d love to try this dish with fresh morels: the blast of earthy fragrance would be heavenly, I expect. Obviously it’d work well with truffles too. I do think you’d want something a little more forceful than dashi to stand up to that kind of intense flavor; dilute veal stock seems about right.

Matsutake Gohan
Now this is brainless cooking: a very good dish with no work at all. Again, I’d love to try it with earthier mushrooms.

What you do is, you take 3 big servings of dry rice and wash well in cold water. Then you put the strained rice in the rice cooker and add the right amount of water according to the cooker. Let sit 30 minutes. Then add 2 Tb sake and 2 Tb soy. Sprinkle on 1 matsutake mushroom prepared exactly the same way as in the previous recipe, and about half a pad of deep-fried tofu cut in thin slices. Close the cooker and run it the normal way. When it’s done, gently toss the rice with the paddle to mix evenly.

I preferred this to the dobin mushi, but again, I think this isn’t my mushroom. With morels, or truffles of course, it would be absolutely spectacular. You’d want spring vegetables instead, like super-fresh peas off the vine, or maybe smallish chunks of asparagus, depending on what’s available. I think I’d use white wine instead of sake and reduce the soy by half; I might add a teaspoon of excellent balsamic vinegar instead or in addition.

So the matsutake part was very good, but a little disappointing.

Fig Dengaku
Dengaku is usually a chunk of tofu or eggplant that’s broiled with a sweet miso glaze. This is such a good dish, and so popular, that it’s evolved a wide range of variations. This one I saw in a blog somewhere as something eaten at a fancy kaiseki place in Kyoto, but I had no recipe. So I made it up.

You need: 3 very ripe figs, 1 cup water, 1 Tb soy sauce, 3 Tb mirin sweet cooking sake, 3+ Tb sugar, 2 generous Tb dark miso. Mix the water, soy, 2 Tb mirin, and 1 Tb sugar in a small saucepan that will fit the figs comfortably but snugly in one layer. Wash the figs gently and add to the saucepan. Let marinate for several hours or overnight, turning occasionally. Mix the remaining sugar and the miso in a smallish bowl, stirring constantly until fairly smooth. Add the remaining mirin and stir until smooth. Bring the saucepan to a strong simmer, reduce heat to very low, and cover the figs with a circle of parchment sitting directly on top; this will help them braise rather than steam. Continue simmering gently for 15 minutes or more, until the figs are quite soft but not breaking. Very, very gently remove the figs to individual serving plates (I used the other halves of the scallop shells). Add a spoonful of the hot braising liquid to the miso mix and stir until dissolved. Continue adding the braising liquid, a little at a time, until the mixture is hot, the sugar is dissolved, and the sauce is the texture of melted chocolate. Spoon sauce over the figs and serve immediately.

I was very proud of this dish. One minor annoyance was that the scallop shells weren’t a great idea: they tip, and the figs have a lot of liquid, so serve in a proper little bowl. My only real complaint was that the fig skins were much firmer than I had expected. Next time I make it, I will blanch the figs first quickly and peel them, and I’ll serve with little spoons as well as chopsticks (western silverware would be better!). All in all, I’m proud of the fact that I started with a photo and a 10-word description from a non-expert blogger, and in one smooth shift executed a very successful dish. I’d do this again — in fact, I will do this again, and soon.

So...

A successful dinner, and I thought a passable test of the whole matsutake issue for us. Conclusion: they’re fine, but I don’t get the hullabaloo. And with the world economy doing what it’s doing, those prices are ludicrous!

Fun With Scallops

2008-10-08T16:46:00.004+09:00

So I’m in Nishiki market buying a bunch of stuff the other day. Nishiki is this amazing place where you can get pretty much anything that appears in remotely traditional Japanese food. It’s a whole bunch of little stalls, most just 6-10 feet wide; this egg place is literally something like a meter wide, and the nice lady has to go into the back to get stuff for you because she doesn’t have almost any display space.

Nishiki market runs for several blocks, covered, blocked off from traffic — and now also from smoking, which is a definite plus around food!

I’d already gotten pretty much everything I needed and I was just looking for something extra, some neat thing that wouldn’t cost too much but would be fun. And I spotted, way at the west end of the market, a guy who does mostly shellfish. He’s got this big tray of ice, on which he’s got live oysters and the most beautiful live scallops I’ve ever seen. They’re $4.75 apiece, which isn’t much considering they’re huge.

Hey, I can shell a scallop — they say it’s the easiest hardshell to do, so I can learn from good instructions. I’ll cut them, then broil in the shell with some pollack roe, because scallops usually don’t have decent roe of their own and I want the richness without mayonnaise and cheese and stuff. The nice man carefully chooses three good ones and packs them into a paper bag with a little plastic thing of ice, puts that in a plastic bag, and I head off home.

So about 45 minutes before I want to serve dinner, it’s time to get those suckers out. I’ve read that you don’t do it more than an hour in advance because they don’t stay fresh. So, out come the scallops and a very, very sharp paring knife. This photo shows both: that’s a 4.5-inch blade, so you can see how big the scallops are.

Since you almost never see scallops live in American markets, I’d never shelled one myself, but I knew what to do. Here’s the basics: You hold it right-side up, and since the mouth tends to gape you can just reach into the upper shell with a paring knife. You cut between the adductor muscle, which is the big part you eat, and the shell. This releases the shell, which you pull off, and then you scrape the bottom clean in the same way. You only eat the adductor muscle, which looks like what you think a scallop looks like: a white cylindrical blob. If there is red roe, you eat that too, but that’s not usual except in one or two Atlantic species. The rest you chuck.

You might think chucking that stuff is wasteful; after all, you’re chucking essentially 100% of the stuff you eat in a mussel, clam, or oyster. But this actually makes the scallop probably the safest bivalve to eat raw: the danger usually comes from the fact that you’re eating a filter, something that eats by sucking things (including nastiness) out of the water. But with a scallop, you only eat the adductor muscle holding the shells together, and you chuck the filter part. (Though in Europe and Japan they usually eat the whole thing.)

So, armed with this knowledge, I grabbed my beautiful scallop and my beautiful handmade knife. In goes the knife, and snap! The thing closes, hard. After a good bit of work, I extricate the knife. I’m not kidding: this thing was really gripping the knife! I try again, this time coming in from the side, where there’s a bit of a gap. I can get the knife a couple inches in, but to get farther the scallop needs to open, and it doesn’t want to. I don’t want to screw around here, because I don’t want to hack the flesh to bits, and besides that knife is frighteningly sharp, so if I slip badly I could literally lose a fingertip. Finally, working as carefully and quickly as I can, I manage to cut above the muscle enough that it starts to let go on one side, but it’s still fighting. Not wanting to kill myself with the knife by yanking or something, I shift to the opposite side, cut-scrape some more, and suddenly uuhhhh it lets go. Now scrape scrape scrape and it all goes in a little bowl for trimming later.

I’m thinking, okay, this is a mutant scallop, right? I mean, I have never had trouble like this with clams, mussels, lobsters, crabs, or whatever. Oysters I have only opened once, but there it’s just a bit of hard pressure and pop! So, on to the next scallop. It’s equally feisty. I’m expecting it, though, so I have a strategy, but it’s still a fight. Same with the final one. If that knife were blunt, I’d have shredded the meat just trying to open the damn thing, and god knows what I’d have done if the blade had been short.

Okay, so far so good. A little surprising, but at least they’re really fresh. Right?

Next I scrub the shells very well with soap, rinse thoroughly, and boil the hell out of them for ten minutes. This is because I’d like to use them as little dishes, you see. Once those shells have cooled and drained in a colander for a while, it’s time to trim the meat and get these puppies under the broiler. What with one thing and another (I had most of a meal to prepare at the same time), it’s been about 30 minutes since the shell fight.

I reach in to the bowl for one of my pals and scoop it out. Suddenly it sort of jump-pulses in my hand. It’s still alive and fighting! Now I’m getting a little freaked. Fresh, yes, but what they hell? I cut and trim as fast as I can, again with my very sharp knife, and it keeps pumping just when I least expect it. Finally I’ve cut enough that it stops moving — mostly: I can still feel it twitching just a bit as I finish up and dump it in a shell half. With some trepidation, I reach for the next... which starts throbbing. I’m expecting it, so I’m quicker, but it’s still weird. The last one, I’ve figured out what to cut first to stop it from jumping around, so it goes more smoothly, but it’s definitely alive.

Let me explain. When I say “jumping around,” imagine you’re holding a small frog or toad or maybe a big goldfish, gently but firmly, almost entirely enclosed in your fist. You thought it was dead, but now it decides it wants no part of whatever you’re up to and makes a break for it. Got it? Can you imagine it suddenly coming to life and starting to squirm? I know it’s just a muscle and a very simple nervous system, but it sure seemed like these scallops were trying to escape. I’m reminded of the heart transplant in the movie Airplane, which keeps bouncing up and down on the doctor’s desk.

Well, at least they’re fresh!

After all that excitement, the actual cooking part was nothing. I put one scallop each the three deepest shell halves and added two 1 cm slices of tarako, which is salted fresh pollack roe. Then a sprinkle of salt, a small dash of soy, and a squeeze of sudachi lime. I ran them under a sorta hot broiler about 3 minutes until the top was just opaque, the inside raw, the underside nearly so — I sure wasn’t concerned about freshness! Ta da, serve immediately.

Very good, I thought. Next time I’d add only one piece of tarako and something else, maybe a little sabayon or homemade mayonnaise or crème fraîche, to add a different, less salty richness, as the combination of richness and salt was a little too forceful against the subtly briny scallop. Cheese seems like overkill. Regardless, scallops this fresh are really fabulous. And at $4.75 per scallop for big honking diver-harvested things like this, I’d do it again in a minute.

I have since found that I did one thing wrong, and that there is a strong difference of opinion about another. The thing I did wrong: you always go in from the side, right by the hinge, not from the front, so the scallops can’t just clamp down on the knife like they did to me. The other thing: some people say you want a sharp knife like I used, but others say you want a butter knife and just scrape the muscle off the shell. That way you can’t shred the meat, you see, and can be pretty rough with the scallop. That system seems to be more popular with bay scallops, which are little, but it does get used with big sea scallops. Next time I’ll try both methods and see which works best for me.

Regardless, next time I’ll be prepared for a fight. Who’d have thought scallops would beat out crabs and lobsters for basic toughness and bad attitude?

Pricey, Ain’t It?

2008-09-30T22:19:00.002+09:00

Japan: lovely food, lots of nice things, but boy howdy is it expensive.

Take this for example.

I made a big pot of clam chowder, and the next day I served the leftovers with a light spaghetti dish. To do this, I used:

2 pounds teeny live clams
1/4 pound mild bacon
1 onion
half a beautiful carrot
sprinkle of thyme
a cup or so very fat whole milk
2 pounds small potatoes
1/2 pound spaghetti
3 Tb butter
2 cloves garlic
1 generous cup fava beans
8 fat shiitake mushrooms
1/4 pound unsmoked salt-cured bacon (prosciutto)
some Gruyère cheese
1/4 pound sweet cherry tomatoes
2 bottles white wine (one for each evening)
1 perfect crusty French baguette

And then 5 kiwi fruit and 1 fat grapefruit for dessert

The total bill was $30. Rough, huh? Gee whiz.

No, but seriously, food is now so expensive in the US, and given that I walked to these stores within less than 15 minutes total (and thus didn’t pay for gas), I find it disturbing that this very expensive country seems to be so cheap by home standards. What’s even more disturbing is that this total bill includes $13.50 for the wine, and Gruyère is insanely expensive — I just didn’t use much.

Admittedly, I’m mostly gloating, but here’s the recipes:

Clam Chowder
Slice the bacon crosswise in thin strips and put in a big pot over medium-low heat until they have rendered most of their fat. Add 1 onion and half a fat carrot, chopped medium. Stir occasionally until the onions are translucent, about 5 minutes. Add 2 pounds small potatoes cut in small cubes, stir-toss until coated with fat, and add enough water to cover by an inch or so. Bring to a strong simmer, then add a generous sprinkle of thyme, reduce heat, and simmer gently about 30 minutes, until the potatoes and carrots are just tender. Add 2 cups very fat milk or half-and-half and bring to a simmer. Add 2 pounds well-rinsed very small live clams (the ones I used are about 1/4" across; if you must use larger ones, scale up the weight). Cover the pot and bring to a strong simmer, then cook about 5 minutes, until all the clams are open (shake the pot to convince any last recalcitrant ones to give up the ghost). Correct salt, and serve with lots of black pepper, some good crusty bread, and a coarse white wine.

Spaghetti Portale
I call it this because I got the basic concept from Alfred Portale, chef and author of The Gotham Bar and Grill Cookbook. His recipe calls for pea shoots or arugula, which I didn’t have, and for which I substituted the fava beans and shiitake mushrooms. You need to use very low-salt prosciutto to make this work really well, but for ordinary cooking a decent ham or blanched bacon will do just fine.

Take 3 Tb or so sweet butter and leave it on the counter for an hour to soften. Mince 2 cloves garlic very, very fine, or purée with a knife if you want. Mash the garlic into the butter evenly. Scrape the butter into a mildly heatproof serving bowl. Add to the serving bowl 1/4 pound quartered cherry tomatoes, 1 generous cup just-cooked fava beans, 1/4 pound prosciutto cut in thin strips, and about half a cup shredded Gruyère cheese. Remove the stems of the shiitake, then cut the caps in quarters. Sauté in olive oil over medium heat until they release their liquid and then reabsorb it and begin to fry again. Remove from heat and set aside. Bring a lot of salted water to a rolling boil. Add half a pound of spaghetti and boil until just barely al dente. As it is nearly done, turn the heat back on under the mushrooms. Spoon off 1 ladleful of liquid into a cup, then drain the spaghetti. Put the spaghetti and the mushrooms in the bowl with everything else. Toss, adding the reserved liquid a little at a time as you go, until you have a creamy sauce and everything is mixed in smoothly and fairly hot. Serve immediately with black pepper and, ideally, fresh-grated Parmesan (which I didn’t have), and a coarse white wine on the side.

Grapefruit For Dessert
I adore this trick, which I got from Jacques Pépin.

Cut both ends off a grapefruit, then slice off the rest of the skin and pith by cutting from one cut end to the next in fat slices. Hold the grapefruit in your off-hand, horizontally, so your thumb can rest on one end. With a paring knife, cut just beyond one bit of section-skin, down to the core, then cut on the near side of the next bit of section-skin. Remove the section. Now cut on the far side of that second bit of section-skin, but when you get to the bottom turn your hand so your knuckles come toward you and scrape the section off the skin. Do it again on the next section, and the next, and so on. The more often you do it, the faster and smoother it will get. The result should be a pile of perfectly clean grapefruit sections. Make a pretty fan-circle of these on the plate. Mound up some berries, diced fruit, coulis of fresh fruit (put fruit in the processor with a pinch of sugar and whiz until smooth), etc. in the middle; I just chopped some peeled kiwis very fine. Squeeze the remainder of the grapefruit, i.e. all the section skins, over the top. Serve immediately. Chocolate is a nice accompaniment, of course.

Mexican My Way

2008-09-20T22:50:00.004+09:00

We recently discovered that Daimaru, a big department store not far from us, has cilantro in its basement food court. Not pricey, either. I am still very confused about how difficult this is to find, but at least now I can get it. While there today, I also discovered that they stock fresh thyme, sage, and the like, so I am no longer so stymied on basic herbs.

I had decided to make Mexican food tonight, using some nice recipes from Diana Kennedy. Before I get to what I made, and how, and like that, let me continue my musings on odd absences and gaps in Japanese food availability.

Why No Mexican?
As I discussed recently, I find it mind-boggling that you cannot get basic Chinese ingredients without an extensive search; we ultimately did find things like fermented black soybeans at a Chinese specialty shop, but I still wonder why you can’t get them in an ordinary store. With Mexican foods, I understand that there is no established connection the way there is with China, but I nevertheless find it strange that this cuisine has so little presence here.

If you think about real Mexican food, not Tex-Mex, you note that it’s dominated by a number of basic ingredients: citrus, fresh herbs, tropical fruits and vegetables, rice, corn, pork, mild dairy products, and an enormous amount of seafood. According to Kennedy and other experts, Mexicans who are into food tend to be quite bonkers about seafood: fresh, local, and all that. Some Mexican foods are of course very spicy, because of the use of chiles in various forms and of many kinds, but this isn’t true of all Mexican food by a long chalk. In fact, it’s quite common to use some of the more intensely-flavored chiles only for flavor, not heat: in many Yucatán dishes, for example, you take habanero chiles, whole and uncut, and let them sit in a hot sauce for a little while, just to infuse the flavor but not to make the dish spicy at all.

Now the only thing I can see many Japanese people objecting to about this cuisine is the spicy thing. Not that there aren’t Japanese spice-maniacs, but certainly the majority of the food here is very mild on that score. Otherwise, this strikes me as exactly the sort of thing Japanese people would love: lots of fresh seafood and tropical vegetables, rice, mild cheese and cream, a little pork or chicken here and there.

But it’s not here. There are Mexican restaurants, but not many, and from the various reviews and descriptions I have read, they tend to be pretty mediocre. As far as I have found, there are something like five or six Mexican restaurants in Kyoto, grand total — and this is a city where restaurants pretty much dominate all other kinds of shops.

So if you’re reading this and you’re a serious Mexican chef, let me suggest that you could get in ahead of the wave. You focus on fresh seafood, you put occasional markers on your menu when something is spicy, and you avoid the things that have become American Tex-Mex commonplaces. Somebody is going to do this, and it’s going to be the next hot thing, the way Italian was quite recently. Go ahead: I bet you could do very well. If you make a fortune, cut me off a piece of it, okay?

Mexican At Home
Based on what’s available and fresh — and what my son will eat — I decided to do two dishes and some little sides. I’d do a chicken-rice-vegetable one-pot thing, a great deal like what the Japanese call a zosui but with very different herbs and spices. I’d do a broiled sanma (Pacific saury) briefly simmered in a green, somewhat spicy sauce. And then I’d do some basic salsa, guacamole, and the like to use as salad/garnish.

The most interesting dish, and in some ways the most successful, was the fish.

Kennedy’s recipe calls for a mild, firm-fleshed white fish, like a sea bass. She has you poach it until barely done, use the stock to make a sauce, and then cook the fish in the sauce to re-warm and marry the flavors. I thought the fish would probably be overdone this way, and I don’t really like poached fish. So I decided to try a merger of Mexico and Japan.

First I made stock: I took the head and frame of a red snapper I had in the freezer from earlier this week, added some frozen vegetable trimmings from my box that I keep for the purpose (carrots, bits of tomato, onion, scallion, etc.), then added a bay leaf, a generous sprinkle of oregano, and half a yuzu, which is a very sour but floral local citrus fruit. I covered it with water, brought to a very gentle simmer, and left it there for an hour or so. Then I strained coarse, then fine, and had good fish stock. (Red snapper, or sea bream, Japanese tai, makes fabulous stock.)

Then I got a sanma (Pacific saury). I got it at Daimaru, rather than my local grocery store, because I was there and besides I wanted something really good. It had already been lightly salted, so I just rinsed it off.

To make the sauce, I put a bunch of stuff in my immersion blender jar and processed until smooth. (See recipe below.) About 15 minutes before dinner, I sauteed garlic, added the sauce and simmered rapidly over medium heat. Then I cooked the fish.

To do this, I used the Japanese shio yaki style. I rubbed the fins with salt, then put the fish under the broiler until very brown and crispy on one side, flipped the fish with chopsticks, and broiled the other side. I now put the fish onto a plate, remove the whole garlic cloves from the sauce, and poured the sauce over. You can see the results: visually pretty cool, I thought.

The flavor was excellent. I think the shift from a mild fish to a dark-fleshed one required more chile and perhaps more cilantro — certainly it needed a bit more salt in the sauce to stand up to the salty fish. Other than that, it was very good. I did think the sanma liver (you grill these things whole, ungutted) was rather bitter, but I am informed that this is usually the case and not my fault.

I’d do it again, no question. But I think I’d use (a) a milder white-fleshed fish, like a small red snapper, (b) more cilantro and salt, and (c) at least double the amount of chile. Then I could serve it with plain rice and something mild for salad and have a pretty wow dinner.

I do think that if I didn’t do the extra chile, the resulting dish would be very much to the taste — visual as well as palatal — of a lot of Japanese people. The sauce is exciting and complex, but it doesn’t overwhelm the fish at all, which would be the big objection. I think it could have been garnished with a little minced tomato, in a line down the fish, for prettiness’ sake, but the intense green and the crispy whole fish made a great combo.

One thing I do need, as you see, is better dishes: this should not have been put on a blah round white plate. Oh well — I am, after all, in Japan, where beautiful handmade dishes are surprisingly inexpensive. So maybe soon I’ll start upgrading my presentations.

The Recipe
[To serve 2 as a main course with salad and rice]
Ingredients
1 pound fish frames for stock
2 cups stock vegetables: carrot, turnip, onion, tomato, celery, etc. trimmings
1 tsp dried oregano (or 3 sprigs fresh)
1 bay leaf
1 large wedge sour citrus, preferably lime or similar
2 smallish whole fish (Spanish mackerel, trout or bass, whatever looks good)
1 cup coarse salt, e.g. kosher
1/4 cup blanched, peeled almonds
1-2 whole hot chiles, e.g. serranos
2 Tb capers, drained
1/3 cup unflavored bread crumbs
4 lettuce leaves, torn coarsely
1/4 cup onion, chopped
10-15 sprigs cilantro, coarsely chopped
4 cloves garlic, peeled
1 Tb cooking oil
salt and pepper to taste

Method

Put the frames, vegetables, oregano, bay, and citrus in a small saucepan and cover with cold water. Bring slowly to a simmer, and simmer gently for 1-2 hours, skimming any scum that rises. Strain coarsely, then very fine, and reserve. You should have about 2 cups.

Rinse the fish and scale if necessary. Rub all surfaces lightly but thoroughly with coarse salt and let the fish sit on a countertop for about 30 minutes.

Put the almonds in a blender and process until as smooth as you can get them. Add 1 cup of the reserved stock and process again, scraping as necessary, until very smooth. Add all the remaining ingredients except for 2 cloves garlic and puree until very smooth. If it seems very thick, add 1/4 cup more stock and puree. Salt generously to taste.

Rinse the fish all over and dry well with paper towels. Rub all the fins, the head, and the gill flaps generously with coarse salt.

Put the oil in a wide saute pan and heat. Add the 2 reserved garlic cloves and saute until just golden. Add all the sauce, plus another half-cup stock, and stir gently. Let simmer 15 minutes; if it gets too thick, add more stock.

While the sauce simmers, turn the broiler on full-blast. Set the rack to be about 5 inches from the flame, and oil the rack very well. Put about 1 cup water in the bottom of the broiler pan, which will help with the cleanup immensely. Put the rack under the flame for a couple of minutes before adding the fish.

Put the fish on the rack, lying on their right sides (if the head is to the left, the belly should be toward you). Broil 3-4 minutes, until the skin is very brown and crisp, and bubbling up in places. (Adjust the rack distance to get this effect in this time.) With chopsticks and/or rubber or wooden spatulas, gently turn the fish over — tongs don’t work. Broil another 3-4 minutes on the other side, until brown as before.

Turn the fish again and remove, with a wide spatula or two, to serving plates. The sauce should be ready: remove the whole garlic cloves and pour over the fish. Serve at once with plain rice and a simple, fresh salad. Chips and fresh tomato salsa are an excellent side with this.

Total cooking time: 3 hours, including stock-making, which can be done a day in advance
Total active cooking time: 30 minutes

Birthday: Down and Then Up

2008-09-19T17:07:00.012+09:00

It was my birthday on the 18th, and for once I didn’t have to spend most of the day running after my kids. So I meandered off for a nice lunch in the areas around the river (Pontocho and Gion).

Down With Gion
The weather wasn’t too bad initially, but it soon became so humid that I felt like I was swimming. So when I reached a lovely old street in Gion on which is a restaurant I’d had recommended to me, I thought, “this is just the thing.”

Nope. “Sorry, reservations only.” I got a nasty feeling that what they really meant was, “sorry, no sweaty foreigners,” which happens quite a lot in that area. But okay, fine, I’ll go a solid step down-market.

Nope. Turned away again, same thing. I was now getting irritated. Another place? Nope.

Okay, you’re thinking, these places were busy, they didn’t have space. Are you kidding? One place that turned me away was empty. I mean, like empty. One couple at an end table, otherwise deserted. “Sorry, reservations only.”

I was now sick of Gion. Pretty, yes, but yuck. Back over the river, I found that there was some kind of school holiday going on, and a zillion 12-year-olds in uniforms were crashing around everywhere making a hell of a ruckus. Scattered among them were a huge number of foreign tourists, which meant that I could tell what ordinary Kyoto-ites were thinking when they saw me: “damn foreigners.” I was distinctly annoyed, hot, and tired — nice way to spend my birthday, I don’t think.

Okay Lunch, Blah Day
Finally I wandered to Rokkoji just east of Karasuma, where tourists don’t usually go, and had a nice lunch at a place called Little Bean House [小豆家, I’m not sure how it’s pronounced]. Curry with mysterious but tasty things, raw pickle salad, tofu, cooked pickles, rice, miso soup. Quite good, not expensive, and in general a positive conclusion to a dispiriting morning. I then gave up and went home.

To be fair to Gion, it’s pretty. No, but actually I do think that these places meant what they said: reservations only. Turns out that the way these places do kaiseki, they make exactly X number of each dish, so they have to know well in advance how many people are coming. If you show up without a reservation, they don’t have food to feed you.

Anyway, I have decided that it’s healthier to believe this than that I was turned way for being white — which is entirely possible. But the whole thing left a bad taste in my mouth, as it were (not to be snide about Little Bean House, which was perfectly good).

Up With Pontocho
The next morning, forewarned, my wife called ahead to make reservations. No problem: we got a reservation at Roan Kikunoi (露庵　菊乃井), just south of Shijo on Kiyamachi. It’s a slightly informal version of the very high-end kaiseki (or technically kyo-ryōri) place Kikunoi 菊乃井, which is much celebrated and often considered one of the best in Kyoto.

It was raining, because the edge of a typhoon is brushing the area, but at least it was passably cool. We dressed up a bit — I wore a black suit, but no tie, and we figured that though we might be taken for tourists, we’d at least be high-end tourists, which means a lot here.

(On this score, Kyoto reminds me of Florence. If you’ve been there and had waiters be nasty to you, chances are you were dressed like a shlep. If you go to Florence, wear a suit and tie, and eat when civilized people eat. Oh, and remember of course that the Florentine definition of “civilized” is “Florentine,” so eat when they eat, like 8:30 for dinner. You do that, you’ll love it. If you fake a few words of Italian as well they’ll adore you, because you’re showing how wonderful you think they are, imitation being the sincerest form of flattery.)

In any event, we got there. Roan Kikunoi is a neat little place jammed behind a large and especially ugly McDonald’s, and I must say I had a nagging worry in the pit of my stomach that this was not going to go well.

Bracing ourselves (well, I was), we came in and sat down at the bar -- definitely the way to do this, by the way, because the chefs make things on the other side of the bar and then hand them to you direct. We ordered some sake, took a deep breath, and ...

WOW. Okay? Wow.

I took photos of most of the courses, once it became clear that the chefs weren’t concerned about foreigners one way or another. My wife was being all chatty in high-speed Japanese, which meant they could be their own chatty selves back, and the older chef who seemed to be in charge was cracking jokes with us and other customers at the bar, lending the whole thing an informal, festive atmosphere. He did ask that I not use a flash, I think because he’d be blinded by it, but I find my camera takes horrible pictures with a flash anyway so that was no biggie. Besides, the Japanese love taking pictures of their meals, so I was pretty sure he didn’t care.

But before I get to the food, there’s one other little thing. I kept thinking that the older guy, who plated several of our dishes and was generally bounciest and most talkative, looked familiar. Then my wife noticed that unlike everyone else, his jacket had no name-tag. Then it hit us: that was Murata Yoshihiro, the Kikunoi chef, the man himself. The guy who plated my sashimi. The guy who, when we asked what one of the fish was, told us it was katsuo... which seemed odd, since it didn’t look much like katsuo, but... and then went, “oh, sorry, wait, no, I’m mixed up. That’s baby hamachi [called tsubasu].” The next course was katsuo, and when it arrives I say to my wife, I thought pretty quietly, “now that is katsuo,” at which point Murata, six feet down the counter, bursts out laughing and says, “right, katsuo, whoops!” Hard to explain, I guess — you had to be there — but it’s sort of like sitting at the bar in, I don’t know, Daniel, and realizing that the guy making jokes and giving you a little appetizer he’s just whipped up behind the bar is Daniel Boulud. If that makes any sense.

Another thing I found remarkable was how every chef did everything, sort of in a rough rotation. You always had one chef standing behind the counter looking on unobtrusively, so when you finished a course he was ready to get you the next. There were several very young chefs on the line, getting what appeared to be helpful, generally positive constructive comments from the older guys. One young guy was cutting a sheet of daikon — a classic technique you have to master, where you take a usuba (honking big straight-edged knife) and shave around and around a daikon to make one huge translucent sheet — and I could see that he wasn’t all that great at it, though the results were fine. As he went along, an older chef came over and gave him some pointers. Our impression is that Roan Kikunoi is where Murata does some of his training of younger chefs, who might move up to Kikunoi when they’re ready. Again, this gave the whole thing a pleasant, cheerful, family sort of atmosphere — relatively speaking: it’s a very high-end place. It was also interesting from a cooking standpoint, because in most Western professional kitchens (at least in America) most of the line chefs do one station and stick to it: they may or may not be able to do other stations, but on a given night a sauté guy is a sauté guy. At Roan Kikunoi, and my sense is at most serious kaiseki places, stations aren’t the system.

Anyway, what did we eat? We got the mid-grade lunch (you pick low, middle, or high; what’s more, you decide when you make the reservation, not when you get to the restaurant):

A Light Lunch at Roan Kikunoi
1) Sakizuke (amuse-gueule): Walnut tofu with very small grapes. No picture: we weren’t yet sure if it was okay, and didn’t want to be those sort of foreigners. If you buy Murata’s book, he’s got a picture there. (And a recipe: good luck with that. Honestly, the recipes aren’t difficult as such, but there’s no way you’re going to reproduce what he serves. I’ll come back to this in a later post.) It was sweet, cool, and at the same time lightly spiked with wasabi. My wife's comment was that she gets the seasonal thing here, because it's cool and pleasant to eat when it's still hot out, and wasabi seems somehow really tasty when it's summer, but at the same time it's getting to be fall, time to eat nuts and grapes and stuff. I couldn't have put it better.

2) Hassun (a sort of overture, setting the palette for the meal): gingko nuts, hamo eel rolled around gobo and rice, simmered-roasted chestnut, simmered mackerel (? we're guessing -- too many things at once to remember perfectly), salted ayu entrails with trout roe in a hollowed-out yuzu citrus, crunchy sweet potato shaped like a gingko leaf, pine needles made of roasted soba noodles. I’d never had gingko nuts, but my wife has: she remarked, “I’ve never had them this big or this good.” They were slightly sweet and great, simmered gently in sake and lightly salted. The whole show came under a little wooden cricket cage (some sort of cage, anyway); again, if you want to see it that way, look at Murata’s book. (Actually, he’s written several, but I mean the one that’s been translated as Kaiseki: The Exquisite Cuisine of Kyoto’s Kikunoi Restaurant.) The entrails thing didn't sound great when I read the recipe some months ago, but it was terrific, sort of like mildly fish-flavored tofu or yuba with a more complex texture, and the trout roe (which was like firmer salmon roe) really set it off, as did the intense floral aroma of the yuzu. I would never have expected that of all the things in this course that one would be my favorite, but it was spectacular.

3) Mukozuke (sashimi): tai 鯛 (sea bream) and baby hamachi (not katsuo!), garnished with chrysanthemum leaf, pickled chrysanthemum petals, and corkscrews of shaved cucumber and carrot. The tai was much firmer than I’m used to, which gave it a distinctiveness that I often find ordinary sashimi lacks.

Sea bream is one of those things that the Japanese get very worked up about. Tai is sort of the ultimate fish here. I've never really gotten this, and to be honest, I still don't. It was lovely, yes, but I confess that I didn't see why it deserved the big deal people make of it. I do think that I'm starting to develop some sense of a palate for sashimi, which is probably unfortunate, given that when I get home I'm almost never going to have the good stuff.

4) Yakimono (grilled dish): katsuo 鰹 (bonito) tataki, which means it’s beaten to soften it up, then marinated and grilled very hot and left raw on the inside. Served with ponzu (citrus-soy) and red grated dashi. I’ve had this dish before, here in Kyoto, and I found myself thinking that this was a completely different dish, just utterly unlike what I’d had. I had thought it a bit fishy and with a somewhat problematic texture: flaky outside, raw inside. I have also long thought ponzu overrated. But this was fabulous. If you've ever had katsuo you now see why I identified it so easily: this triangular shape with the deep red is what it invariably looks like. It's meaty and in some ways more interesting than tuna, I think. I'm not sure why I don't see this at US sushi places, because given how popular tuna is -- and how much cheaper katsuo is -- you'd think it would be perfect. Maybe it doesn't keep well? In any event, really good ponzu, really good katsuo, the latter perfectly treated -- yum!

5) [not sure -- maybe a sort of palate-refresher like naka-choko?] : hamo eel-bone crackers. Very lightly salted, served with no sauce or anything. Crunchy and delicious, a great light thing after the meaty katsuo.

Eel-bone crackers I've heard about a lot of times, and I've seen pictures in which you get an entire eel backbone fried in a sort of coil. I've always thought it looked pretty but also rather unappetizing, even in the pictures I've seen from Nobu: it looks like what it is, in fact, i.e. a fish skeleton. These little crunchy nibbles were like nothing so much as cracklings: sort of the most ultimately high-end pork rinds ever. What's more, they make you sit up straight, because they're all calcium! I can't get over how these little munchies were such a great thing, so homey and everyday and yet totally unfamiliar.

6) Futamono (substantial soup, usually nimono): harvest soup with hamo covered in toasted rice, egg “tofu” cut in a moon shape for moon-viewing season, and Tamba shimeji mushrooms. You really taste the dashi in this, and it’s quite true what they say: it offsets and elevates everything, providing an almost silken background. We joked with Murata about the fact that he sometimes serves this dish with matsutake mushrooms instead, which cost a fortune; he ruefully laughed with us. (When I say they cost a fortune, I mean that, for instance, I recently saw some very nice ones at Nishiki market, priced at 38000 yen for a box of 8 fat ones. That's about $40 US per mushroom. And you can go well up-market from that if you want to. They're the truffles of Japan, at base.) These Tamba shimeji (i.e. from Tamba) were terrific, though: I don't know whether it was just the mushrooms or something in the preparation, but whereas I usually find shimeji just fine but a little bland, these were earthy and rich and intense.

7) Shiizakana (assorted dish with multiple elements): grilled or broiled suzuki (Japanese sea bass) with some finely-grated green herb we couldn’t identify, which was also in the daikon “dip” on the left. I liked this fine, but I found the herb too mystifying to make sense of the whole dish; suzuki also doesn't have any particular associations for me -- it's just mild white fish, a lot like good sea bass from the Atlantic. Given how excited people in Boston get about bass, though, I'm guessing this is something pretty meaningful for the locals.

If anyone out there has any guesses what this green stuff might be, I'd be grateful for an explanation. It had a light, grassy sort of flavor, and somehow the whole dish, although it came together, just didn't seem to me to stand out very well. Maybe it's also that I am not the biggest fan of grated daikon (I don't hate it or anything, but I don't really get the fascination with it. Now boiled daikon, boiled until mushy -- that one I can't stand.)

8) Gohan, konomono, tome-wan (rice, pickles, and soup): grated lotus-root soup (what they call here a vegetable potage -- that's the French term) with a kind of mochi ball (pounded glutinous rice, in this case not sweet); pickled daikon, eggplant, and kombu; and uni rice. See those chunks of orange? That’s sea urchin: uni 海栗. Lots of uni. Really a lot of uni. Did I mention there was uni? What’s more, the young chef who presented this one tossed it in a kaman 釜 pot right there, and they made enough that we could have seconds. We did: my wife joked that I should know how to say “okawari,” which means “more please,” because we’ve taught Sam to say it at his nursery school — the chef who dished up the seconds thought that was pretty funny (my impression is he has kids). There was some more left, too, so he made it into nigiri balls and wrapped it so we could take it home. Now that’s my idea of a good late-night snack: uni rice nigiri made by one of the finest kitchens in Kyoto. Oh -- the soup was great, as were the pickles. But... did I mention about the uni rice?

9) Mizumono (sweet): sorry the picture is blurry, but I was a little dazed after the uni rice. Walnut ice cream and a creamy caramel flan sort of thing — a little different from the usual Western version, but in subtle ways I can’t explain coherently. As we were finishing up, the chef chatted with my wife about where we were from and so on; his judgment was, “Boston? Good fish there.” They also discussed lobster.

We staggered out, replete, to find Chef Murata waiting. He said polite things, thanked us for coming, and saw us to the door with lots of bowing. I mean, yes, they’re supposed to do that, but it’s pretty cool to have a super high-end chef seeing you off in classic formal style.

For the next hour or so, we just wandered around the general area, because we couldn’t face doing anything else. The only problem was, you’d pass restaurants with all these appetizing photos of their food outside, and think, “you’ve got to be kidding: I’m not eating that.”

The last thing the other chatty chef (the one who talked about Boston and lobster) said to us was that a lot of nice fish is just starting to come in around the Japan Sea, which was a polite way of suggesting that maybe we should come back again in October. I think we will. And maybe the next month too....

So now I’m wondering: what would have happened if we’d had the top-level lunch at Kikunoi, rather than the mid-level lunch at Roan Kikunoi (which is cheaper). Would it have been as stunning? Would it have been as much fun? What about dinner (which starts at about $300 US per person — ouch)? Right now, I find it hard to imagine. That was one of the best meals I have ever eaten, not just because the food was stunningly terrific (which it absolutely was) but also because of a wonderful atmosphere that actually made me feel welcome: they all genuinely seemed to care if I liked what I was eating, every step of the way.

Technically, it was still my birthday, at home on the East Coast anyway. A nice way to turn 38!

Chinese Weirdness

2008-09-14T00:22:00.010+09:00

I was getting rather tired of Japanese/French semi-fusion food, which I have been doing for the last few days. I think I first realized I was getting tired of it when I plated a sanma (Pacific saury, very similar to a small mackerel or a large sardine) tartare in a perfect cylinder topped with an even layer of salmon roe, garnished with a vinaigrette sauce adorned with capers and chopped hard-boiled eggs, and thought I should probably photograph this for the blog---and then thought, "ah, what the hell, too much trouble." This despite the fact that I got this recipe from Le Bernardin's cookbook (the 4-star fish restaurant in New York), made some fairly clever substitutions based on availability in Japan at this season, and all in all made something that was perfect for blogging. Turns out, I was getting tired of this. Why?

All that protein, I guess. I mean, you've got fish, and more fish, and eggs, and then vinegared stuff to brighten the flavors... but where are the veggies? Turns out, the Japanese are on the whole kind of bad about this. They do eat some vegetable superfoods, like fresh soybeans (edamame) and various seaweeds, but they're really not great about fresh vegetables in general. They'd rather pickle them, which is fine but gets us right back to the vinegar and salt thing.

Well, since I now have a passable sense of what I can get in the local market, produce-wise, I went to my cookbook collection (which has now arrived, thank goodness). I was sort of idly turning pages, flipping through different books, but nothing seemed very appealing. And then... my eye happened on Barbara Tropp's wonderful Modern Art of Chinese Cooking. Oh yes---Chinese stir-fry! Bright flavors, handled quickly and intensely. And I should be able to get everything very easily, this being East Asia, after all, where the influence of China has been almost overwhelming for a very, very long time.

So I went on a shopping expedition and found...

Huh?

Wait just a second. I'm in Japan, right? I'm in what is probably the culinary center of Japan, where every other shopfront is a restaurant and people are absolutely stark, staring bonkers about food. I'm in a place where people will pay as much at a good Chinese restaurant as they'd pay at a good French restaurant.

But I can't get cilantro. I can't get black soybeans. I can't get Chinese-style roasted sesame paste. I can't get Chinese wine. I can't get hoisin sauce. I can't get Sichuan peppercorns. What the hey?

A Little Rant
If you don't know much about Chinese cooking, or about Japanese history, you may not see why I think this is quite as bizarre as I do.

The first point is that almost everything in Japanese aesthetic history really starts with China. You constantly see all sorts of stuff about how distinctively Japanese is that stuff about empty space, simple wooden architecture, paper shoji screens and tatami mats, and so on. But all of that is very closely patterned on certain dominant aesthetic trends in China in the Tang dynasty, when the Japanese first had really extensive and intricate intellectual exchanges with China. In theory, this is when Buddhism came over to Japan; almost certainly it arrived earlier from Korea, but from the Japanese perspective it's all China. The same thing goes for the writing system: the Japanese writing system is adapted from the Chinese, using the same characters (kanji) plus a series of wildly simplified characters that serve as a syllabary (the kana).

The second point is that many of these ingredients are not only common in Chinese cuisine, but elsewhere. Cilantro is native from southwestern Asia to north Africa, but it has been spread around the globe. Wikipedia notes, correctly, that cilantro or "coriander is commonly used in Middle Eastern, Mediterranean, Indian, South Asian, Latin American, Chinese, African and Southeast Asian cuisine." Note the odd man out: Japan. Yet beyond so-called traditional Japanese food, some of the most popular kinds of restaurants in Japan are Chinese, Mediterranean, Indian, and Southeast Asian. What's more, there is the longstanding connection between Japan and Brazil, where once again cilantro is very popular (it is essential as a final garnish on feijoado, the national dish).

Beyond cilantro, let me note that Sichuan peppercorn is actually the same plant, so far as I can tell, as what the Japanese call sansho, the only difference being that the Japanese generally use the green leaves while in Sichuan you use the dried berries in their husks. If you're cultivating the plant, why isn't it available?

A really irritating example here is fermented black soybeans. The Japanese love fermented soybeans--see my experimental discussion of nattō. The Chinese black beans are prepared a bit differently, but I cannot imagine that many Japanese would not like the taste. In fact, I know for certain that seafood steamed or stir-fried in black bean sauce is extremely popular in Chinese restaurants here. So why can't I get the stuff?

I could see it if I were talking about ingredients that don't keep well or something, and perhaps that is part of the problem with the cilantro, though I rather doubt it. But everything else I'm talking about keeps for years. Literally: you can buy a vacuum-sealed package of black beans and not open them for a couple of years, and they'll be just fine.

Now I'm sure I could get Chinese wine (Shaoxing wine, for example) if I wanted it, if I just scoured the local liquor stores. But this is easy to substitute: if you're not using very much, sake will be perfectly acceptable. But the other things are not something you can work around: you cannot make something steamed in black bean sauce without black beans.

I decided to say what the hell and make what I could, with some appropriate substitutions insofar as I could get away with it, and the results were pretty good. But I remain mystified.

If any reader can tell me what's going on here, why I cannot find the most basic Chinese ingredients after searching several fairly large grocery stores, I will be very grateful!

Chinese Dinner At Home
For some reason I haven't been in the Chinese-cooking mode for a while now, and I'd forgotten how much fun it is. You can do almost everything difficult well in advance, and you plan around what burners and stuff you have. At more or less the last minute you whip it together, with lots of panache and clanging and general fun--if you're stir-frying in a wok over very high heat, you can also get some nice flare-ups which are exciting to watch--and you can quickly dish up a whole bunch of different things. What's more, almost everything keeps, and can be eaten cold, or reheated, or whatever; if there's something that doesn't reheat (like clams or something, for example), you just tell your family they have to finish that one off.

My only disappointment with cooking Chinese now is that Sam won't eat things that are spicy, which puts a damper on my enthusiasm for Sichuan and Hunan cuisines--an enthusiasm shared by Tropp, which is another reason I adore her cookbook. (Tropp died tragically young in 2001, and so far as I know only completed two cookbooks: The Modern Art of Chinese Cooking and then the China Moon Cookbook. If you don't have the first one, get it!)

Still, I managed a few dishes, despite all: Don-Don Noodles, Ma-La Chicken, Wine-Explosion Vegetable Soup, and fry-steamed Jiaozi dumplings (for the latter, I used frozen premade, I'm afraid, and they turned out to be not great).

Don-Don Noodles
I love this kind of flavor: bracing, intense, and complicated, with a heady waft of spice. It's typically Sichuan, I think, and couldn't be easier to make. In fact, I made the entire shebang in advance, then nuked it, because I didn't have an extra burner to use.

There are two components: noodles with carrot shreds and peanut sauce.

I used udon noodles, which are good and plentiful here (and I had a zillion packets of really good ones in the freezer), but at home I'd go with the Chinese preference for fresh egg noodles. Whatever you use, you need it to be firm, bouncy, and preferably a little assertive, but don't worry if they turn out a bit wimpy: no self-respecting noodle is going to stand up to a sauce like this. I boiled the noodles until a bit underdone, then drained and rinsed in cold running water until quite cool, then drained again. Then I added 2 Tb toasted sesame oil (you need the Chinese or Japanese stuff, which is brown, not the "cold-pressed" or middle-Eastern stuff that is more or less clear) and tossed until all the noodles were coated. I took two medium-fat carrots, peeled them, split them down the middle, put them cut-side down on a board, and then used a vegetable peeler flat to the board to shave them into thin slices. These slices I stacked and set up more or less parallel, and with a knife cut them into fine julienne. I tossed the carrots with the noodles, covered with plastic, and refrigerated. You can leave them like this for 24 hours or more without any problems at all. To reheat, I just nuked them on medium-high power until they were warm-to-hot throughout.

To make the sauce, put 10-12 fat cloves of garlic (peeled) into the food processor and whiz, scraping down a couple of times, until semi-fine. Add about a bunch of mitsuba and some shiso leaves, all chopped up coarsely; in a sane world, just add a medium bunch of cilantro, coarsely chopped. Whiz on pulse again, scraping down often, until the whole thing is pretty fine. Now add half a cup of peanut butter (the organic kind that separates is infinitely superior) and whiz briefly to combine. Add half a cup of good soy sauce, a few Tb sugar, a small dash of sake (you should use Shaoxing wine, or maybe good dry sherry, but again...), and a couple Tb hot chili oil (try to get the kind that has scary red goo on the bottom of the jar, which I find tastes and mysteriously keeps better). Whiz, scrape, whiz, scrape, and continue until it's all pretty smooth, which doesn't take long. Taste: if it's intense but not exciting, add another Tb sugar and whiz again. Don't overdo the chili oil, as it will get hotter as it sits. Scrape the mix into a small bowl, cover with plastic, and let sit on the counter for a couple of hours. Refrigerated in a sealed tupperware, it'll keep for a very long time, but be sure to let it come to room temperature before serving.

To serve the dish, just plop the noodles down on a plate and top with the sauce, or have your guests add as much as they like. To eat, you sort of toss up the noodles and sauce (and carrots, obviously) with your chopsticks until it's all more or less combined, and then eat. If all has gone well, it will seem very mild-mannered for a bite or two, and then creep up and belt you one between the eyes.

My version was just fine, but lacked that high fragrance of the cilantro. I also thought the chili oil was wimpy.

Ma-La Chicken Cold chicken salad garnished with special hot-spicy-numbing oil. Came out a treat, I thought, and again, couldn't be easier. The only pain is the plating, and you don't have to go in for the silliness I did -- I just felt like it, okay?

There are four components: cold raw veg (usually cucumbers), cold blanched veg (asparagus, green beans, longbeans, whatever -- usually green, though), cold moist-poached chicken (breasts are better for this, but it really doesn't matter much), and the special oil. Then you have some dressings, for which my favorite is a sesame-paste one or the coriander dressing I used in the noodles (make extra and these two dishes are easy -- but a little repetitive).

The cold raw veg is... cold and raw. That was hard. Just slice and arrange.

The blanched veg: I used asparagus, as I say. Cut the pieces about 1-2" long, preferably at an angle, rolling a quarter-roll around between cuts so the ends are not parallel. Blanch asparagus about 1 minute in very fast-boiling water, beans maybe 90 seconds, and so on, just until barely cooked but very crunchy. Immediately shock in ice water, then drain and chill until serving time. To serve, put in a wide mound in the center.

The sesame paste sauce is a breeze with an immersion blender. Put a few Tb Chinese sesame paste (which is brown) in a small bowl. Add a Tb or so sesame oil, soy sauce, tamari (only the best brands -- check, because many are not tamari at all but rather colored pseudo-soy), sugar, and hoisin sauce, and a generous dash of hot chili oil. I replaced the sugar and hoisin sauce with a couple Tb tonkatsu sauce, which is sort of a mediocre variety of sweet hoisin -- this is kind of like replacing canned tomato sauce with ketchup, but it works. Whiz the whole works until smooth, add a tiny dash warm water and whiz again, and then taste. It should be thick but pourable. Let develop, covered, on the counter for a few hours. Keeps more or less forever in the fridge, but again, bring back to room temperature before using.

The chicken is a special Chinese trick. Get one chicken breast, on the bone, with skin. Take some slices of ginger, preferably spanking them firmly with a cleaver-side or tenderizer to open the pores, and put them in a little pot. Add some scallion chunks, spanked. Add some Sichuan peppercorn if you can get it, which I can't, as you know. Garlic doesn't work here, I'm afraid. Fill the pot up about 1" from the rim, cover, and bring to a rapid boil. Meanwhile, go over your chicken breast and remove any bloody bits or other nastiness. When the water is boiling fast, turn off the heat and immediately slide the chicken into the water. Poke it under with a fork or chopstick or something and cover the pot. Leave for at least 2 hours. When you're ready to serve, pull out the breast, peel off the skin, and peel the meat in one piece off the bone (it will come pretty easily). Put it flat on the board and slice at a steep angle against the grain into thin slices. The meat will be just cooked through and extremely moist. Mound it prettily on the asparagus or whatever.

Before you actually start slicing anything, though, put a few Tb each plain cooking oil and roasted sesame oil in a very small pan. In a small prep bowl, put a few coins of fresh ginger, a tablespoon or so of scallion rings, a dash of Sichuan peppercorns (I used powdered sansho), and some dried chili flakes or a couple of whole dried chilies. Swirl the oils to mix, add one ring of scallion to the oils, and place over medium heat. When the scallion starts to sizzle pretty well, remove the pan from heat and add the contents of the prep bowl. Shake-swirl to mix it up, and then put the bowl off heat somewhere to develop flavor. When the salad is all plated up, the oil should still be warm but not broiling hot. Remove the ginger coins with chopsticks, add a small dash of soy sauce and swirl to mix, and then immediately pour the whole mixture gently over the top of the chicken, making sure most of the various chunky things in the oil remain on the chicken.

My version was pretty decent, but the chili flavor didn't develop well. I think I didn't really heat the oil enough, for one thing, and next time I'll also break open those whole chilies and shake out the seeds, to see if that works. The special Sichuan peppercorn flavor wasn't there, but that's the fault of Japan. The sesame sauce was pretty decent, I thought, but there wasn't enough of it. I didn't like the mustard sauce I made, so I won't give a recipe.

Soup
Was soup. Good soup, but soup. Basically what you do is you prep all your vegetables, and divide them into those requiring more cooking and those requiring less. You have good chicken stock on hand, and you whisk up 4 Tb cornstarch in 6 Tb cold stock or water for every 6 cups of stock in the soup; that is, for each cup soup stock, mix 1 Tb stock and 2 tsp cornstarch. Leave the spoon in the mix, as it will quickly settle out again. Whisk an egg white, whole egg, or two egg whites (up to you: it depends how much egg thread you like) in a small bowl, just until more or less smooth, not frothy.

Heat a big pot quite hot over medium-high heat. Add 1 Tb or so oil and swirl to glaze. Add a few Tb rice wine (I had to use sake, which is much too mild for this, but what the hey), which will immediately flash into a boil. Instantly add all the plain stock: I used about 6 cups. When it boils, add the veg for long cooking, bring back to a boil, lower heat, and simmer a minute or two, stirring occasionally. Add the veg for shorter cooking, stir, and cook a few minutes more. Turn the heat very low. Taste for seasoning, and add salt as needed. Add sugar too: if the flavor seems flat, add sugar to brighten mediocre vegetables. Whisk up the cornstarch mix again and add it, then stir constantly and gently for a couple of minutes until the soup turns glossy and just a bit thick -- it won't really clarify, but you'll notice its texture changing dramatically. Now pour in half the egg in a gentle circle, wait a second, stir gently, then pour in the rest the same way, wait a second more, and stir again gently. You should now have floating threads of barely-cooked egg. Serve the soup immediately, garnished maybe with a little finely-cubed ham.

Personally, I think this soup was a little blah -- the blurry photo does it justice, I guess. Maybe I didn't add enough sugar, but I think it just wasn't cool enough to hold its own against the noodles and chicken. I think it maybe needed something with a little brightness, or maybe just a dash of soy, or... maybe decent Chinese rice wine instead of Japanese sake? Could be: the sake just seemed insipid and bland, whereas nobody ever called Shaoxing wine, even the really cheap stuff, bland. I do think a generous sprinkling of white pepper might have lifted it, but Sam wouldn't have touched it. To be fair to the soup, he did eat quite a fair helping of it, so I guess maybe it's a matter of taste.

Concluding Request
In any event, this is a serious cry for help, as Bernie the Agent said to Kermit the Frog. Can somebody please explain to me why the hell I can't get basic Chinese ingredients in Kyoto?

Terror Sushi!

2008-09-09T20:41:00.005+09:00

{offstage knocking}

Nakagawa: Come in!
Oumu: Hello! You are Mr. Nakagawa, owner and proprietor of the Whizzo Makizushi Company?
Nakagawa: I am.
Oumu: Right! I am Inspector Oumu, and this is Constable Yinkaku. We’re from the Hygiene Squad, and we’d like to have a talk with you about this box of your sushi called the Whizzo Quality Assortment.
Nakagawa: Oh yes?
Oumu: Now what’s this one, then? It appears to be a squodgy egg surrounded with unidentifiable vegetable bits, rice, and then ... is that pound cake?
Nakagawa: Ah, that’s one of our specialities! Egg Cake Surprise! You bite into a nice egg-covered thing, and discover dessert and dinner rolled into one!
Oumu: I think it would be more appropriate if the box bore a big red label, “Warning: Pound Cake!” And what’s this one... ah yes, Crunchy Frog. What sort of makizushi is that?

{... ad nauseam}

Simmered Mackerel -- Saba no miso-ni

2008-09-05T16:03:00.008+09:00

Before I left the US, I'd already decided I was going to do this blog, so I asked some people what they might like to see in it. A couple of people said "recipes!" pretty forcefully, so here goes.

Mackerel is very popular in Japan. Technically most of it, called saba, is Spanish mackerel, which is considered by Western gourmets to have a milder, more delicate flavor than its Atlantic cousin. It's a fairly small fish, perhaps 18 inches long and quite narrow. It's got dark, somewhat oily flesh, and you have to be a little careful to avoid it becoming "fishy" in the unpleasant sense. The most important part of that, of course, is to buy it extremely fresh, which isn't difficult to do here as its prime season is August-October.

You can eat it raw, but it's unusual to do so; when you have it as sashimi, it's normally very lightly pickled, which is to say you fillet it, peel off the outer skin, and rub it with very mild vinegar and a little salt. 15 minutes later, you rinse it off and it's ready to slice. If you've had mackerel at a sushi restaurant--which you probably have if you've had much sushi, as it is not expensive and it holds up to cold-storage quite well--you've had it in this pickled form, though probably it was pickled longer and harder than this.

What people do at home, though, is different: you make saba no miso-ni (鯖のみそ煮), which is simmered mackerel in miso. When I first spotted these things looking great in the market, I had my wife look up what to do with it, and she found more than 100 Japanese recipes online... and then discovered that almost all of them, like literally 85-90 of them, were for this dish.

I decided to serve this with fresh tofu and yuba (湯葉 soymilk skin) from the local tofu-maker I just found, served chilled with garnishes (hiya yakko); rice (always); and then a stir-fry of okay-looking broccoli because I thought we ought to have some veggies.

Here you can see everything that went into dinner. Front and center is the little plastic dish of yuba, still in its protective bath of soy milk. Clockwise from this, the broccoli stalks sliced medium-thin, cut bite-sized; my mediocre vegetable knife that I use for everything because I haven't got anything better; the tofu (silk style, very soft), cut in cubes and bathing in ice water. In the metal bowl are the chunks of mackerel fillet, which I've blanched very briefly and then are soaking in ice water. Soy sauce, the broccoli florets, a mixture of miso and mirin (sweet cooking sake), julienne negi (giant scallion/leek) for garnish, a bowl of julienne ginger and chunks of negi (which you can't really see here), and then a bowl of shimeji mushrooms. Behind the yuba are, left to right, two cloves of garlic, a shiso (perilla) leaf, a stub of very young ginger, and some thin rounds of negi. In the very back you can see Maia's bum, which did not go into dinner.

Miso-Simmered Mackerel (Saba no miso-ni)

Ingredients

To make the mackerel itself, you need (for 2 people) a medium-sized mackerel. This dish is quite filling, especially as you're serving it with rice, and it's really not necessary to use more. But on the other hand it is extremely easy to make, so it's a good thing to serve to a small crowd if you can get the mackerel filleted. I bought bone-in and filleted it myself, functionally but not well--I'm working on that one.

Then you need:
1 knob ginger
1 negi (giant Japanese scallion/leek)--I'd substitute 4 fat scallions
a cup or two of mild but firm mushrooms, like shimeji, shiitake, etc. (optional)
600 cc (3/5 US cup) water
2 Tb sake (cooking sake is adequate for this)
1 1/2 Tb sugar
1/2 Tb soy sauce
2 Tb miso (use the medium-amber stuff, not red or brown)
1 Tb mirin (sweet cooking sake)

(The mushrooms are an optional addition to the mackerel. You could also use various other similar things that will stand up to serious simmering and retain some flavor and firmness. You don't want greens or anything else that will strongly flavor the sauce, which is why again mildly flavorful mushrooms are perfect. I bet you could find a way to do it with eggplant chunks, too, though I've never seen this.)

All of this is easily available in grocery stores all over the US, even in rural Vermont, because it keeps well. The only thing that may be troublesome is miso, but if need be you can order this on line. It stores almost forever in the fridge so long as you keep the surface covered with the plastic that comes with it and the lid on the box.

Preparations

To prepare, cut the mackerel fillets into large bite-sized chunks, about the size of a piece of nigiri sushi, if that helps. Cut an X about 1 inch in each direction, just barely through the center of the skin, to prevent the fish from curling as it cooks. Bring a medium pot of water to a rolling boil, and set up a big bowlful of ice water next to the stove. Put one or two pieces of fish skin-side down on a wide slotted spoon or spatula (a spoon is easier) and dunk the fish into the water for about 2 seconds, then immediately drop into the ice water. Repeat until all the fish is in the ice water. This process helps remove any lingering fishy smell.

Cut a bunch of 1 1/2-inch julienne of the white of the negi, for garnish. Cut the rest of the negi into 1 1/2-inch lengths. Cut the ginger into a skinless block, then cut planks with the grain, then stack the planks and cut into fine julienne. If using mushrooms, clean and cut or tear into bite-sized pieces.

In a fairly small heatproof (e.g. Pyrex) bowl, put the miso and the mirin and stir until more or less smooth.

At this point you can leave everything for a while, but you really ought to cover the negi and ginger with plastic and put into the fridge. If you're fast with a knife, it would be better to cut these aromatics at the last minute. The fish can wait in the fridge, under the cold water, for a couple of hours.

Cooking

Put the water, sake, and sugar in a saute pan or saucepan, ideally just wide enough to hold all the mackerel in one layer. Put the bowl of fish, a dish with the soy pre-measured, the bowl of miso/mirin paste, and the bowl of negi chunks and ginger (and mushrooms, etc.) within easy reach. Have ready either a curved lid for a pot one size smaller than the saute pan, which can therefore sit easily on the bottom of the pan, or a circle of parchment paper that again will fit inside the saute pan; if you're used to using parchment lids for braising, note that it is not necessary to make a vent in the center. You also need a smallish ladle and a big slotted spoon. Pick out a deep serving dish and put the negi garnish next to it.

Put the pan over high heat and bring to the boil. Add the mackerel, skin-side up, and boil about 5-10 seconds. Add the soy and shake gently. Turn off the heat. Tip the pan a bit, and scoop a few ladlefuls of the hot liquid into the bowl with the miso/mirin paste. Stir this paste mixture thoroughly, dissolving the miso completely. Pour over the fish in the pan. Add all the negi chunks and the ginger, scattering them more or less evenly over the fish. Turn on the heat to medium-low, put the lid over the top of everything, and let simmer 10 minutes.

Note that this whole process should take very little time--the quicker the better. Once you understand what's involved, you'll see that the whole procedure can be done in under a minute without much trouble. It's not a problem if it takes a couple of minutes, but the fish and liquid must not be allowed to cool significantly.

Remove the fish with the slotted spoon and put in a shallow mound in the serving dish. Cover this with the negi chunks, ginger, and any mushrooms or whatever that you may have added. Pour the liquid gently over the top. Garnish with the white negi julienne and serve immediately.

Serves 2 people. Total cooking time, 12 minutes. The dish multiplies well.

Note that this technique of dropping a lid into a pot is very common here, because braising on top of the stove is an extremely popular technique (dishes made this way are called nimono). Traditionally, you use a wooden lid just a hair smaller than the pot, and float it on top.

Cold Tofu (Hiya Yakko　日や奴)

Personally, I wouldn't bother making this at home, because the tofu is almost always dreadful, but some people like it--and some probably have access to truly fresh tofu. It couldn't be simpler: ice-cold silky-smooth tofu with a little garnish.

Ingredients
1 pad super-fresh silken tofu
best-quality soy sauce
negi cut in fine slices
fresh-grated ginger
small wedges of very sour citrus (yuzu, sudachi, kabosu, lemon, lime...)
mild aromatic leafy herbs, in chiffonade (shiso, parsley, perhaps basil...)
white sesame seeds
high-quality bonito flakes (katsuo bushi), shredded

All you need is the tofu and the soy. Pick as many or as few of the rest as you like, based exclusively on what is very fresh and perfect.

Method

Fill an attractive serving bowl with ice-cold water; it can have some ice in it, but not much and not big cubes. Rinse the tofu very gently in cold water (if it's really super-fresh, made in the last couple of hours or so, just remove it from the water it's in) and place on a plate or a plastic cutting board and cut into medium cubes. Transfer the cubes carefully to the ice water, which should just cover the tofu. Place in the fridge until ready to serve.

Each guest gets a pretty saucer. Within reach should be some sort of attractive dish with all the garnishes, carefully separated and nicely presented. Put the tofu in the middle, in its water, and provide a wide, shallow spoon, ideally finely slotted, to serve. Each guest takes a piece of tofu, puts a little soy on it and sprinkles on a little of whatever garnishes he feels like, then eats it.

Note that I only have mediocre-to-bad dishes, so this doesn't look nearly as good as it tasted.

If you have ultra-fresh high-quality tofu, this is lovely. If you have the usual stuff I can find outside the Asian markets at home, this is pretty mediocre, shading toward nasty. If your choice is between super-fresh firm tofu (the usual Chinese preference) and the stuff in a box or made by some hippy-dippy moron and packaged two weeks ago, go with the firm stuff. All tofu should be labeled to tell you when it was made. If it wasn't made in the last couple of days, skip it.

Chances are, if you're horrified by this dish and thinking, "that's nasty," you've never had halfway decent tofu. It's not so easy to come by in the US.

Additions

I just found our local tofu maker, and I bought some tofu about two hours after she'd made it. I also bought some yuba, which is soymilk skin (on the left in the picture above). Let me explain.

You make tofu by making soy milk, heating it, and adding nigari, which is actually a general term for a number of different chemical compounds (ideally the naturally-occurring forms, but it's all pretty harmless and used in very small quantities). This makes the milk curdle, like cheese. You drain the curds and press them in a cheesecloth-lined box, and this makes tofu.

Now when you heat soy milk, it's just like milk: it tends to form a skin on the top. So what you do is, you very carefully lift this skin off like a sheet, and you hang it briefly to firm up, and then you fold it or roll it and put it in a little cold soy milk so it won't dry out. This is yuba.

Kyoto is sort of the center of the universe when it comes to yuba. I mean, Kyoto-ites will tell you they're the center of the universe for a lot of things, of course, but even in Tokyo everybody knows that the best yuba is in Kyoto. There are shops that specialize in the stuff! I just bought it from the tofu maker, but it was really good. It's soft enough that you can sort of cut it with chopsticks, and then we ate it pretty much the same way as the hiya yakko. Wow!

Stir-Fried Broccoli (ブロコリのスターフライ)

Ingredients
1 fat head broccoli
2 Tb canola oil, in all
1 Tb soy sauce
1/4 cup water
pinch salt
2 cloves garlic, minced
a little sesame oil

Method

Cut the florets off the broccoli. Cut the stalks into medium-thin planks, then cut in half or so to produce bite-sized pieces. Heat a wok or an unlined skillet over maximum heat until very, very hot. Add 1 Tb oil and swirl around. When it smokes, in a few seconds, add the sliced stalks. Toss constantly for about 30 seconds to a minute, until you start to see a little browning happening. Add the soy sauce and the water in one go, swirl the pan to distribute, and let it alone. In a minute or two, when the water has almost completely boiled off and the broccoli is starting to fry, add the remaining oil and toss to distribute. Add the florets and a pinch of salt. Toss constantly for 30 seconds or so, until very bright green. Add the garlic and toss for another 15-20 seconds, until very fragrant. Pour into a serving dish and garnish with the sesame oil.

If the broccoli is fresh, this is wonderful. You can also add a pinch of dried hot pepper flakes with the garlic--I love that, but then my son Sam wouldn't touch it. Oh well.

Uosue Lunch (うをすえ)

2008-09-03T14:33:00.005+09:00

Today my family were off at school, doing errands, and whatnot, so I had lunch alone. I decided to try Uosue, a little hole-in-the-wall kaiseki place just east of Karasuma-dōri, one block south of Shijo. It’s a little hard to spot if you’re not looking for it, it’s so small, but we’d heard that it’s very good and has an inexpensive two-level lunchbox set (niju bento). You can also order a full-on omakase meal, where they prepare what they think is good today, and that’s 3950¥, but the lunchbox set is only 1050¥, just a hair less than $10 US.

The atmosphere in this tiny place is very homey and informal. The guy at the end of the bar was cracking jokes with the fish-cutting guy, and the businessmen who came drifting in for lunch were treated politely but warmly, which doesn’t go without saying around here. They were nice to me, and welcoming. It all seems to be one family: the fish-cutting guy and the older lady in the back appear to be married, and the young guy who was making dashi referred to the old lady as “mother,” and so on. I think there’s a brother in the back doing hot things. So it seems to be pretty much a little family business, and it’s very good: unpretentious, friendly, informal, but with excellent food.

You can see what I got in the picture. One level is rice, and the other has (clockwise from the front) a little sashimi, some nimono (煮物, vegetables simmered in flavorings), and a little pickle. In the back, in the white cup, is chawan mushi (茶碗蒸し, steamed teacup), which is a sort of light savory custard, made of egg and dashi (出汁), steamed in its little cup. In the black bowl is miso soup.

Eating this meal and thinking a bit about blogging, it occurred to me just how difficult this is going to be. I mean, you can’t really say, “I had sashimi.” It was sashimi, yes, but what fish? Having seen him cut it, I’m pretty sure it was katsuo (鰹, bonito, or skipjack tuna), but if I hadn’t seen him I’d be guessing unless it was something obvious like maguro (鮪, tuna steak). I have an awful lot to learn—but I do have some time!

(Incidentally, I should perhaps note in passing that I am providing a lot of kanji, Chinese characters, for things I eat. This isn’t showing off—I get the stuff from dictionaries, not from memory, mostly—but on the other hand it’s not really how Japanese people do this. If you see maguro for sale, almost invariably you will see it written マグロ, ma-gu-ro, instead of as 鮪. The thing is, I did Chinese for a while, and it’s in many respects easier for me to deal with the characters. What’s more, the characters translate across East Asian languages pretty effectively, which the syllabary doesn’t. I’m also indicating my little private protest against the de-kanjification of Japan. Anyway….)

Okay, so the sashimi was very good, and the wasabi (山葵, a character-pair I have not seen yet in Japan, but which means “mountain hollyhock”—what’s so hard about that?) was the real thing. As you may not know, the green wasabi paste you get in any but the highest-end sushi places outside Japan is not in fact wasabi at all: it’s horseradish dyed green. Wasabi itself is very expensive, because it only grows in clean mountain streams and requires intensive cultivation. You can get it here in the supermarkets if you look, but it’s pricey, and the root is about half the size of a horseradish root. You don’t use much, and you grate it immediately to order, and I’m told it doesn’t store well—all of which are good reasons why ordinary folks even in Japan don’t generally shell out for it. If you have it, you’ll know, because (a) the texture is not completely smooth, since it is hand-grated, and (b) it has a milder, sweeter taste than horseradish, to which it is not related. In any event, the shiso leaf underneath, which you can barely see, and the shredded daikon underneath that, were the usual. Yes, that is curly parsley, I don’t know why.

The nimono... this is the tricky bit. What were those lovely things? I can identify some of them, but with others I’m guessing a bit. Okay, so let’s start with the long skinny thing. I think this was very young bamboo shoot, though I’ve never seen it this thin. It had that mild, slightly creamy flavor, though, and was just yielding. Due south of that is what I thought was a circle of eggplant (the little narrow kind that are very popular in Kyoto in this season), but it turned out to be sato imo (里芋), the white taro I had as tempura at Honke Owariya. It was good, I thought, but not especially remarkable to my unsubtle palate. Southwest of that is a little red square. This was a cube of something firm and gelatinous, like very rubbery Jell-o. If this were China, I’d have been absolutely sure this was a cube of gelatinous pork blood, but this being kaiseki in Japan I knew for damn sure that wasn’t it. In the end, I have no idea what it was. It was good, flavor-wise, but I have never been a big fan of the rubbery gelatin thing, so the texture didn’t work for me.

Continuing around clockwise, there is a little cake. I am pretty sure this was primarily kinpira gobō, i.e. burdock root and carrot simmered a long time together, somehow made into a cake and simmered some more, like the fish balls in oden. I’m also pretty sure this was not a fish ball, but it might have been so subtle that I couldn’t tell. Now kinpira gobō has never been a favorite of mine, and you may recall that my wife’s kinpira rice burger at Mos Burger still leaves me in a cold sweat at the memory. But this was wonderful. I’d eat five more of these in a heartbeat. I’m just hoping this is something you can get in oden, because once the weather turns cold I’m going to Nishiki market to see if I can find these things. Wish I knew what it was....

Next up, a perfectly-turned little potato. I’ve never actually seen a perfectly-turned potato outside of photographs. This is something that people like Jacques Pépin had to learn to do when they worked at the highest-end Paris restaurants, but nobody does it much any more. Well, here they do. As to flavor, it was very mild. I was expecting something stronger, because since potato has very little flavor of its own I’m used to having it “spiked,” as it were. But I did actually get some rather refined potato flavor from this, which was rather pleasant and home-like.

Above that, in the corner, is a piece of eggplant with some kind of slightly sweet sauce on it. Wow! Along with the kinpira cake, this was my favorite. Soft and yielding, but still with a little bite—perfectly cooked eggplant. The sauce was I think mostly miso and mirin or sake, with a small amount of sesame on top. You usually see this combination broiled: you split an eggplant, put it on a flat stick that’s like a bamboo fork, spread thinned miso paste on the top, and run it under a broiler. This was much the same flavor, but simmered. Excellent!

Top right, a roll of tamago yaki, the rolled egg omelet. I used to hate this, because it’s usually sickly sweet, but in Kyoto they just use dashi and no (or very little) sugar. It was good, I thought, but I can’t say it knocked me over. Just in front of that is a piece of fish that I cannot identify. Mackerel, maybe? Saury? I don’t know. It was nice, whatever it was. And on top of that is a little rainbow-striped leaf-shaped cake of this spongy stuff I’ve seen several times here, which turns out to be kōya-dōfu (高野豆腐), a kind of freeze-dried tofu invented centuries ago at Kōyasan.

The pickle in the back right corner was actually a bit spicy, and I suspect it was the local green pepper which, unlike most Japanese peppers, is mildly hot. But I’m really not sure.

The chawan mushi was truly excellent. I’ve never entirely understood this dish until now. Basically it’s just dashi with egg whisked in thoroughly, steamed gently until the egg is just barely set. You put a few things in the bottom, like maybe a shrimp, a little vegetable, or whatever, and then as you eat the custard you keep turning up these little treasures. Now I’ve had this a number of times before, and I’ve always thought it was sort of mediocre: salty, bland, and pointless. Today I figured it out. The whole thing is about the dashi, not the egg at all. The egg doesn’t taste like much, and the little treasures are pretty simple, but the whole point is that everything is offset by the dashi. In a way, it’s a method of showcasing the flavor of dashi, whereas usually dashi is used to help amplify the flavor of something else. Because Uosue is a real kaiseki place, albeit an inexpensive one, they’re quite hard-core about their dashi. As a result, their chawan mushi is fabulous. Of course, the texture of the egg was creamy and all that, and the little pieces of kamaboko (fish cake) and some sort of unidentified fish were perfectly good, but the dashi was wonderful. I finally got it!

The miso soup, just to finish up here, was perfectly good, but I didn’t notice anything particularly special about it one way or another. It was the usual kind, with a little wakame seaweed, not clam or something like that. I liked it, but after the chawan mushi and some of those nimono, it was pretty unremarkable.

All in all, I’d give Uosue a big thumbs-up. I got a fabulous lunch, which incidentally was much more filling than I’d have expected, for under ten bucks. Each little thing was very good in its own way, and they also went together very effectively. One of these days I’ll come back here and try an omakase dinner for 3950¥, and I’m sure I won’t be disappointed.

Hot Cakes

2008-09-01T21:23:00.005+09:00

Today’s food post cancelled due to excessive heat.

It was 86 and very humid and sunny, so it felt like 93 according to the local weather people.
Nevertheless...

My son Sam just had his first day at nursery school (幼稚園), and here’s a picture of him being excessively cute in his little uniform. Come on, say it with me, “awwww!”

He had a good time, handled well the fact that nobody spoke any English and he’s been avoiding actually speaking much Japanese for a while, and generally dealt with it like a trooper. This is especially big, I think, because the school year here starts in April, so all the other kids in his class know each other, and he’s the new kid, and he’s funny-looking (blond, blue-eyed, totally not Japanese, you know), so it can’t have been easy.

So...

I took him for cake. I’d spotted a place around the corner that looked good, and he got all excited about it, and then it turns out it’s way fancy and quite expensive. This cake cost 460¥, which is $4.25 or so. Since it’s about 2" square, that’s a lot!

But it was really good. Note that the layers of icing in between the layers of genoise are full of fine slices of strawberry.

Sam picked it out himself, and I think it was a good choice. One thing I know for sure: he snarfed it down pretty quick!

Next post, food again.

A Sichuan Lunch

2008-08-31T22:59:00.007+09:00

A couple of weeks ago, my wife picked up the latest edition of meets regional magazine, which seems to be aimed at semi-hip young men in the Kansai region. Just like me! No, actually for men quite a bit younger than me, who listen to cool music, dress funky, and like to eat a bit wild. I squeeze in because I’m male, in Kansai, and eat anything.

This issue was about spicy food. Now as I noted in passing a few posts back, the usual word for “spicy” is karai (辛い), which does mean “spicy” but not necessarily hot-spicy. So all kinds of Indian food qualify, as would pretty much any American barbecue, as does some very salty food like salt tempura. But mostly it does mean hot-spicy, and thus most of the restaurant reviews are of Korean, Chinese, Indian, Mexican, Carribean, and so forth places that do fiery dishes.

This being a magazine for hip Kansai men, most of the entries are for Osaka, but there are some in Kyoto and I carefully copied out the addresses and found them on my little pocket atlas. (No mean trick, this: Japanese addresses can be pretty difficult to find anyway, but Kyoto addresses are often exceedingly difficult—so much so that our address for the post office isn’t the official government address, because it doesn’t include enough information to find us without having a good map and knowledge of the city, something apparently the government lacks. We spent an hour waiting for the guy in the ward office to figure out our official address, and in the end he got it wrong. But I digress.)

A week ago or so, we tried PURUDA, a Korean place up on Rokkōji-dōri, which was quite good but I forgot to take photographs. We only had lunch anyway, and you have very limited options for the lunch menu. I’ll go back sometime for dinner, maybe, although I’ve seem some much cooler-looking Korean places.

Today we went to the zoo, which is near Heian Jingu (平安神宮), the enormous shrine and garden up in the northeast. At the corner between the shrine and the zoo, just up from the main road, is Dragon Gate Chinese Restaurant (中華料理龍門, which I’d guess is locally read chuka-ryōri ryūmon), a Sichuan (四川) place with several branches, one of which turns out to be very close to our house.

Following the recommendation of meets magazine, I had the spicy beef noodles. My wife had a mapo doufu set lunch, which included a little soup, rice, and pickle, as well as a little deep-fried meat thing that we cannot identify. Sam was tricky here, because he said he wanted soup and rice, but they didn’t have any soups we thought he’d like much; we got him a slightly crab-flavored egg-drop soup, and that seemed to work out more or less fine. We also got some gyōza, steam-fried potsticker dumplings.

The noodles were excellent, and very good value. For 900¥ ($8.25) you get this big bowl of noodles with lots of pieces of meat, some vegetables, and a thick soup-stew. It’s very intense, spicy in the classic Sichuan fashion, based on a combination of dried chiles, black and white pepper, Sichuan peppercorn (花椒, Jap. 山椒 sanshō), chile oil, ginger, garlic, star anise, and salt. Sichuan peppercorn is slightly numbing on the lips, and somehow that helps make the chiles and the complex spiciness of Sichuan dishes more fragrant and exciting. As you eat these noodles, you keep thinking, “this is really awfully rich and heavy, and boy it’s spicy, and there is no way I’m getting through this whole bowlful—I’ll just have one or two more bites.” Then you do it again, maybe after having a little beer in between. This is brilliant college-student food: cheap, filling, and intense. For me, it’s great too, but I really shouldn’t do this often: it’s quite rich, and I don’t really need to get fatter, and besides, well, not to put too fine a point on it, it’s going to be kind of spicy-hot several hours later, if you know what I mean and I think you do.

The mapo doufu was good, I thought, though not the best I’ve had. The tofu itself was of course soft and creamy and flavorful, Kyoto being one of the centers of the world of tofu. But the sauce and garnish were also rich and complex, the whole Sichuan mala thing (numbing-spicy, 麻辣). I thought it needed something, but I’m not sure what, since the noodles were a lot to be getting on with and thus I didn’t have very much mapo dofu. We are not at all sure what the little bit of fried meat just to the right of the mapo dofu was; it was perfectly decent, whatever, but I'm a bit lost on this one. The soup was egg-drop (卵花), and the pickles were a fairly mild example of a classic Sichuan pickle that is a lot like kimchi but I think is made from the stalks of mustard greens, though I'm never sure whether terms like "mustard greens" really mean the same thing as what I know in America or are some sort of odd but standard translation-cum-paraphrase. In any event, the set lunch was good, but I'll have to try it (or at least the mapo dofu) again before I can make any pronouncements.

Sam claimed the crab soup was spicy, but I thought it was very mild, creamy, and elegant. Of course, there was no way I was going to be able to detect subtle spiciness in this, with what else I was eating, so I’m probably not the best judge. I’d guess it had a little more white pepper than he wanted. Certainly Maia liked it, squodged up with a bit of rice.

The gyōza were good, but nothing to write home about. I did find it interesting that the dipping sauce consisted solely of garlic, hot chile oil, and vinegar (rice, I think), with no hint of soy. In my extensive experience of gyōza (which I, having lived in Taiwan for more than a year, will always think of as jiaozi), soy is always sort of the foundation of the sauce, so this was new to me. Of course, on the bus home, it occurred to me that maybe you were supposed to add soy to this, as you have a soy sauce thing on your table already. I don’t know. It was fine, regardless, but as I say, nothing to write home about. You’ll note from the picture the standard Japanese way to serve them: you cook five or six pressed closely together in oil on a small nonstick fry pan, then add water about halfway up the sides and cover, and when the water boils off you pick them up, stuck together in a line, and serve them crispy-side up on an oval plate. I’ve never seen this in Taiwan, but everyone does it in Japan. I include here an example that wasn't from our lunch, but rather from "su-lin" photostream at Flickr, which is a pretty good representation of how they're usually presented at Japanese restaurants.

All told, Dragon Gate gets our thumbs up. It’s good Sichuan food, done well, at very reasonable prices. I’ll have to go for dinner some time and see whether the menu gets more extensive then, as is common, because I did think that the menu we saw was a bit short. In any case, if you like Sichuan food and are in Kyoto, they have four outlets, so try one.

An Evil Experiment

2008-08-30T21:12:00.011+09:00

I seem to be alternating here. First a thing about pretty decent food, then one about bad food, then good food, so maybe it’s time to talk about bad food again?

Let’s talk about nattō (納豆), shall we?

Nattō is fermented soybeans, which you stir up with rice, mustard, and sliced negi scallions, as well as sometimes other things like raw egg, bits of raw fish, and so on. I don’t mind fermented soybeans in a number of their forms, but this stuff is nasty and has a truly unpleasant texture, since when you stir it vigorously it develops slimy strings that resemble what comes out of your nose when you have a very bad cold.
In this photo (from “jasja dekker” photostream on Flickr, licensed under Creative Commons), you see that snotulosity that appears to be sauce? It’s not snot: that’s what nattō is like, because it’s essentially soybeans (the bean-looking things) that are fermenting to produce squidgy horror on the surface (the snot). Remember the movie Aliens, where all the aliens were covered with this gooey slime? Like that, only less carnivorous. I cannot imagine why both adults and children love to eat this stuff for breakfast. I mean, bad enough anyway, but seriously not something I want to face first thing in the morning, you know what I mean? Ugh.

Now here, in a photo from the photostream “whalt,” you can see what happens when you stir the stuff up.

Isn’t that delightful? Knew you would. If you are interested, search Flickr for "natto" and see what beautiful, horrible photos turn up (jasja dekker's photo is an especially lovely example).

The funny thing is, before I got here, I had an interesting experience with a Chinese-style hotpot dish I’d never had, in which the dipping sauce was made up of a whole bunch of weird things. Soy, sake (because we couldn’t find Shaoxing, the yellow rice wine), sesame oil, pungent shrimp paste, some kind of very spicy fish paste, and chunks of very-fermented tofu. You stir this up into a medium-thin paste and dunk your food in it. It was good, but I decided I didn’t really like the shrimp and fish things, so the next time around I did soy, sake, sesame oil, hot sesame oil, and the fermented tofu, and it was excellent. I ended up with jars of the makings, so I started putting this sauce together late at night as a snack. So my wife and I thought, “hey, if Chris likes this stuff, which is pretty pungent and basically nasty, he’ll probably like nattō.”

No such luck, it seems.

So… time for experiments. Maybe I just don’t like what the Japanese do with nattō, and think it could be done better some other way, right? Let’s try it: soy, sake, sesame oil, hot fermented bean paste (ladoubanjiang 辣豆瓣酱), and nattō, all whisked up together. We’ll try it with and without seafood pastes, for which in take two I’ll try karatarako (辛鱈子), which is semi-spicy salt-preserved pollock roe.

Here goes: my step by step in-process photos!

First, the fixin’s. Front and center, the nattō in its three-tiered supermarket package. Then, clockwise around, the karatarako, sesame oil, soy sauce, cooking sake (I’m not wasting good stuff on an experiment this dubious!), and doubanjiang.

Now let’s take a good look at that yummy nattō! Open up the package and take a little stir….

And...

Okay now that our appetites are whetted, let me point out that nattō has a distinctive smell, not one that a whole lot of people outside Japan find attractive. Some say it smells a bit like blue cheese, and there’s a bit of truth in that, I suppose. Mostly I think it smells like itself, which I realize isn’t the most helpful thing to say. It’s pungent, a bit cheesy-musty, a little like overnight-soaked beans, and at the same time just a little bit nutty. If you can imagine that, I’ll bet you’ve had nattō already, because it’s not much of a description.

Now in this photo, I have added a medium dash of soy, a small dash of cooking sake, a splash of sesame oil, and about 1 Tb of doubanjiang, and then stirred vigorously. Looks unpleasant, doesn’t it? See those nice bubbles of gross sliminess, now special Chinese-style spicy gross sliminess?
Here’s some bar food to eat with this delicious dish: deep-fried vegetable dumplings, kara age (fried chicken chunks), salty edamame beans boiled in the shell.
So what’s the verdict?

Actually, it’s not bad at all. It’s kind of pungent, and my wife insisted that before I go to bed I have to eat the last bit, because she doesn’t want the house to smell like nattō when she gets up in the morning. But suddenly it is transformed from slimy pungent stuff that has almost no good qualities to something that has a few unfortunate qualities (slime!) but is really quite decent. You wouldn’t want to eat a whole lot of it at once, I think, but a little bit is fine. The sticky slimy stuff turns into something almost resembling sauce, and it’s pretty good when you dunk the fried dumplings or chicken into it. The whole beans retain their firmness, and the sesame oil enormously complements the subtle nuttiness of the nattō.

So my conclusion? A couple things first….

For one thing, you have to take into consideration the fact that I used very low-end ingredients at every level, in the sense that whereas the soy is sort of mid-low grade, the nattō, sake, sesame oil, and doubanjiang are all rock-bottom basics. If I went with the best I could get, everything would be much improved, I am sure.

You also have to recognize that I have not yet tried the kara tarako (spicy Pollock roe) in the mix, and my current feeling is that there is something, some other pungent-rich flavor, that’s missing. My guess is that the roe will be perfect, although there are other things you could use (shrimp paste, uni, grilled eel liver, whatever), each of which would have its own powerful flavor to deepen and complicated the mixture. I will try this soon and keep you posted.

In the meantime, my conclusions?

Nattō isn’t half bad, and in fact can be quite decent in its way. The problem is that in my opinion, the Japanese don’t know what to do with it. They are under the impression that its worst qualities are its best, and they don’t understand that the pungent intensity of nattō requires other kinds of pungency to bring out its best qualities. As far as I’m concerned, nattō should be bar food: salty, pungent, spicy, and a bit rich, and served with cold beer. Eating it in the morning is bizarre.

I can see using mustard instead of doubanjiang, but I think the nutty fermented flavor of the latter helps develop the good side of the soybean flavor of the nattō. I like the sliced negi with the dish, and may try adding that when I also add the roe. I can see why you'd want to add the richness of egg, but I think it's slimy enough without raw egg, thanks very much, so I'll stick to sesame oil and perhaps the rich roe.

If you like nattō already, you are probably shocked by this conclusion. If you like nattō already, though, I can’t help you: it’s too late. If you don’t like it, you would possibly be pleasantly surprised by my concoction, and if you are ever under the gun to eat a big serving of the stuff I hope you will remember these principles. If you’ve never had it, I strongly recommend that you skip it.

Soba Out, French In

2008-08-30T00:39:00.012+09:00

Owariya Soba

Today we went a little ways north and tried Honke Owariya (本家尾張屋), a soba restaurant that's been open since 1465.

I first learned about this place from Kyoto Foodie, where you can find some lovely pictures that more than make up for the lack of quality in mine.

Sam, of course, suddenly decided that he wanted chicken instead of noodles, so he had an oyako donburi (親子丼), which is chicken and egg (oyako: mother and child) on rice. It was excellent. I must say that I do not usually like this dish all that much. It's fine, I guess, but I've never really understood why it's so popular. Owariya's version—hardly their specialty—made some of this clear to me. The chicken was juicy and tender, the egg just barely cooked and thus beautifully soft and moist, and the rice perfectly complemented the whole.

I had Kyo-yasai Ten Seiro (京野菜天せいろ), which is cold soba (zaru soba) with tempura-fried Kyoto vegetables. Kyoto has these special vegetables, known as Kyo-yasai (京野菜), which are slightly different—and in some cases really a lot different—from their counterparts elsewhere in Japan. As you can see in the tempura dish, I had (clockwise from the front) myoga (茗荷), local peppers, a mushroom cap of a type I didn't recognize, lotus root, some kind of yam, and some local variety of sato imo (里芋), which is a sweet white taro that's a bit mealy-textured by comparison to what we call a sweet potato in the U.S. All were really excellent: crunchy but not excessively so, moist and flavorful on the inside. The soba was spectacular, but I cannot possibly explain why: I simply don't have the vocabulary for it, not having eaten enough decent soba in my life. This will change, I assure you, especially since Owariya doesn't charge noticeably more than any other decent noodle shop: my elaborate lunch set me back about $14, I think, and a more ordinary dish like Sam's or my wife's was more like $9. All I can say intelligently about the soba is that it had its own flavor, it was firm and bouncy but yielding, and it didn't seem to collapse in the mouth the way some soba does (because of the lack of gluten, I think). Since there is a free playspace nearby for little kids, I will probably be taking Maia fairly often on days when she doesn't have daycare, and we will probably eat lunch at Owariya. As you see from this photo, she's a big fan of soba... and I assure you, this is in no way a posed photo, but rather a fat little hand reaching into a photo.

Sarah had soba and egg in soup (玉子とじ), and thus got to try the famous dashi. It was certainly very good, but I really have not developed the sort of palate that can tell that this was as spectacular as the Kyoto Foodies say (and I believe them). I apologize that this picture is a little blurry.

All in all, I'd say Owariya is wonderful. You can see what the room we ate in looks like in this photo, and there were many other rooms with ordinary tables. We chose to eat on tatami mats at a low table because this allows Maia to crawl around rather than be strapped to something. A bit of a pain chasing her sometimes, but it wasn't crowded (as you see) and she had a great time.

Thanks, Kyoto Foodies!

Bocuse At Home
For dinner, I decided to make use of things on sale at my local grocery store: potatoes, cod roe, chicken bits of various kinds (as I think I've mentioned before, you can't readily get a whole chicken around here), tomatoes, local green peppers. I decided to make some recipes I found on Paul Bocuse's website. I figure if Bocuse likes it, it must be good.

First, classic Vichyssoise, the cold potato-leek soup invented at the New York Ritz a long time ago. I won't give recipes for this or anything, because they're posted for free. Here's the soup recipe. I used negi, the giant Japanese scallions, instead of leeks. They were mysteriously expensive today, so I didn't use as many as I should have, and so it came out more of a negi-potato soup. But it was certainly good. Needed more salt. That's one thing about cold soups: you have to salt them while they're hot or the salt won't dissolve easily, but salt loses its savor when it's cold so you have to oversalt. I didn't do enough.

Second, I did Basque-style chicken (poulet basquaise), which is a chicken fricassee cooked with garlic, flavorful green pepper (mild poblanos would work much better than the usual supermarket green peppers), ham, with a tomato-onion sauté base. If you like chicken fricassee at all, it's very good. I did have a little trouble with my pans, because my range is so small that I couldn't readily get the pans to sit on their burners at the same time, which made tossing the contents more than a little tricky. But it worked. Sam liked this, although he didn't touch the green peppers (as I knew he wouldn't).

Third, herbed fresh cheese (cervelle de canut). I used most of a package of Australian cream cheese and a little cream to make the fromage blanc, and I used every herb in the house instead of the ones he recommends. Thus I used shiso (紫蘇, perilla), shungiku (春菊, a parsley-like herb), a little negi scallion, and basil, as well as all that garlic, of course. I did not use a garlic press as suggested here; I think these recipes must be dumbed-down a little, because I've very rarely seen a serious European chef recommend one of these things. I used a technique I got from Jacques Pépin: you chop the garlic pretty finely with a knife, sprinkle with a little coarse salt, and then essentially spread the garlic on the board with your knife. After each spread, you scrape up all the garlic on the inside of the knife-blade and do it again, and again, and again, pressing down hard. Very quickly, you have perfectly pureed garlic. Incidentally, when you chop garlic fine, the trick is occasionally to wipe the outside and then the inside of the knife-blade (the right and then the left, if you're a righty) on the pile of garlic on the board. If you do this right, the two passes leave you with a tidy pile of garlic in the middle and just a little still attached to the inside of the blade, which is where you want it anyway. With practice, you can do this very fast, and it is very close to the spreading motion that makes garlic puree, so you can have the one flow into the other with just a left-handed sprinkle of salt (which helps bring the moisture to the surface and make the stuff spread, in case you were wondering). I cut some of the local pseudo-baguette into sticks and toasted them in the toaster oven, and they dunked in the cheese very well. I recommend this recipe highly.

Finally, I did a little cod roe persillade, for which I got the recipe from Jacques Pépin's website. I did not use fish liver, as it wasn't available without a search, whereas cod roe is pretty ordinary stuff around here. I think his recipe is intended for much larger roes than I was using, because it was just a little tougher than I'd have liked. But the flavor was excellent, and given that roes are constantly available and often very inexpensive this is certainly a dish I will experiment with. I think these little roes ought to have been poached in beurre monté rather than cooked brown on the outside first, and then you'd pour off most of the monté sauce before adding the garlic and parsley. I used a local citrus instead of lemon, but as the thing I used (sudachi, I think) is quite sour and good-tasting, it was a minor and positive adaptation.

Those with small children may be interested to know that Maia liked the roe, and that Sam pretended not to like it because (being 3) he was in one of those moods. Maia also liked the Vichyssoise, which Sam did not. Both of them liked the cheese—in fact, at one point we couldn't figure out why Maia was being such a pain, and it turned out she wanted to be fed more cheese.

All in all, I'm rather proud of myself doing all this in about 3 hours flat, much of which time I was doing other things as well. All the dishes were good, and in every case I can see pretty clearly how to improve the next time. Of course, it helps to be using recipes from two immensely respected world-class French chefs, but hey, I'll take the credit.

Review: Mos Burger

2008-08-27T21:53:00.009+09:00

This evening we went to Mos Burger, which I believe is supposed to mean "MOSt delicious Burger," if you follow. This is one of Japan's more successful fast-food chains to challenge the global hegemony of McDonald's, Burger King, and the like.

My basic opinion: it's rotten. Don't bother. Each burger is about $3 (¥320, give or take). The menu can be found at this website.

Now Sam wanted a hot dog, Sarah wanted a kinpira rice burger, and I decided to go for the Spicy Mos Cheeseburger. Here's what we got.

Here is the Spicy Mos Cheeseburger. It's quite a bit nastier than it looks. "Spicy," I take it, is used in that broader sense of karai (辛い) that means salty and/or odd-flavored. The goo between the tomato and the cheese is unidentifiable weirdness, some sort of glop that they insist on calling "special sauce." I hope the ingredients are secret on this particular special sauce, because otherwise they could probably be prosecuted. Imagine that you found weird pickles in the back of your fridge left over from who knows when, chopped them fine, stirred them into that jar of ketchup that somebody gave you when they were moving out ten years ago, and then for good measure you decided to add a little vinegar. The cheese wasn't, let's just put it that way. I mean, McDonald's cheeseburgers have plastic that resembles cheese a lot more than this. The burger was essentially a circular slice of meatloaf, without any flavoring whatever, which meant that it had that strange smooth mouth-feel you get on over-processed meatloaf, but without the possibility of flavoring that usually is the saving grace of over-processed meatloaf. I should note, in passing, that they seem to love over-processed meatloaf here, and indeed serve it with a thick goo they mislabel "demi-glace" sauce, the result being hanbagu (as opposed to hanbaga, which is a hamburger). So I'll pass on Mos Burger's Mos Delicious Burgers.

Then we come to the kinpira rice burger. Kinpira gobo is stir-fried burdock with various flavorings. The "rice" in the rice burger comes from the bun, which is basically a soft rice cake. So you put the one inside the other, and you have the kinpira rice burger. Now this, as the inspector said to the maker of Crunchy Frog, is extremely nasty. I had a bite, disliked it intensely, and then as I reached for my ginger ale got a truly horrendous aftertaste. I don't know what they're putting into these things, but it's foul. See all that yummy carrot and stringy brown stuff? The brown stuff is gobo, and the carrot is cooked with it to be sure that it has no flavor of its own, and the whole thing is wet and gloppy and has a strange acid-sweet taste that resembles low-quality Southeast Asian fish sauce more than anything else I can think of. I think if you wanted to make this at home, what you'd do is you'd take a plain rice cake, cut it in half horizontally with a thin knife, and then leave it out in a humid place for a couple of days to get nice and squodgy. Then you'd take thinly-sliced carrot, burdock, onion, and pencil shavings, and boil them in soy and fish sauce until good and slimy, and then leave this mess to drain overnight on the counter so it takes on a delightful "leftover" flavor. Sprinkle with stale black sesame seeds, toss with a tablespoon or so of corn oil, salt heavily, and you're in business.

Sam's hot dog was really not at all bad, albeit very much unlike what Americans think of as a hot dog, and with far too much ketchup. The dog itself was certainly passable as a mild sausage, with some bite to the skin, a little hint of spices and actual pork in the meat, and a distinct juiciness. I was sort of impressed on this one, I must admit. The onions weren't as fresh as they might have been, and the mustard had minimal flavor, and the bun was simply bad, but all of those things were well up to the high standards of, say, Wendy's or Burger King. If I had to eat at Mos Burger again (please God, no), I'd order a plain dog and fries. The "spicy" dog apparently has sliced jalapeños on it, which sounds rather a good idea, but I'm not going to chance it, I think. If I could get the hot dogs by themselves at the supermarket (probably I can, but I haven't tried), I would make this at home much better than they do at Mos Burger, and I'm not being immodest in saying so.

I was still hungry, despite the mediocre, rather limp and overly hot fries to go with my hideous Spicy Cheeseburger, so I decided, what they hey, why not try the new Teriyaki Chicken Burger? Honestly, how bad can it really be? Can it possibly rival the Spicy Cheeseburger or the Kinpira Rice Burger for vileness? How dreadfully can you make teriyaki chicken, anyway? Actually, it wasn't nearly that bad. Bad, yes. Unpleasant, slimy on the outside and dry on the inside, flavored in a trashy chemical sort of fashion and without any saving graces. But at least it wasn't actively awful. I mean, unlike the Spicy Cheeseburger, it didn't leap out and say, "Hi there, I'm really vile." And unlike the Kinpira Rice Burger, it didn't actually follow your shuddering palate as you sat up in horror and say, "Hey, you didn't get enough noisome evil!" I could eat it without more than a grimace. Why they feel the need to chop the chicken into small chunks, making it impossible to eat this as a sandwich without dropping bits all over, is beyond me, but perhaps the executive chef types who are responsible for Mos Burger were thinking, "gee, this really isn't all that bad; how can we do something inexpensive to undermine any sense of quality here?"

Certainly I think whoever is responsible for this hideousness known as Mos Burger deserves a good slapping, and should never again be allowed anywhere near the food industry.

After Some False Starts...

2008-08-26T17:03:00.016+09:00

... I’ve finally gotten ready to start putting this blog up.

As it says in the description, I’m an academic, foodie, and passable home cook. I’m on sabbatical this year in Kyoto, along with my wife, who speaks Japanese (which I don't) and is teaching this year; my son Sam, who’s 3 and will be in nursery school; and my daughter Maia, who’s not yet 1 and will, we hope, be doing some daycare. So I have quite a bit of time on my hands, and I thought I’d indulge myself and get serious about cooking and eating.

(As you can see, Sam and Maia both like the local cuisine.)

Kyoto is often said to be the culinary heart of Japan, although these days Osaka has a pretty strong claim. The deal is, according to Kansai-area foodies, that Osaka is great for earthy, robust food, and Kyoto is more about subtlety and elegance. So this is where you get things like kaiseki, the rarefied cuisine of lots of little tiny dishes delicately prepared and subtly balanced to harmonize with the seasons and so on. I’ve never been a big fan of the whole simplicity thing, as you’ll discover, so this is a good opportunity for me to break some habits and learn something new.

Now on the subject of false starts, the first thing was that our rented machia house (at the end of this street, on the left) came with almost nothing: a really horrible knife, two battered nonstick pans, and some mediocre dishes. So we headed out to buy stuff. The problem was that nobody seemed to know where to go. The staff at my wife’s office said to try Daimaru, a local department store that’s supposedly having some sales, but we were appalled by the prices. I mean, seriously: who’s going to pay $250 for a basic soup pot? — and, no, it wasn’t anything fancy either. Rubber spatula for $30? You've got to be kidding.

Then we heard about Muji (無印), or “no-name,” which we did. Things were a bit pricey, on the whole, but the quality seemed good and we found quite a lot of good stuff. The 100-yen shops had some really rock-bottom basics, too, but I still didn’t have a curve-sided pan or wok, for example, or a lot of other things. Finally we heard about Kawabata Nikku (川端ニック), which is up in the northeast, and that covered almost everything. So it took a week or so just to get some basics.

Turns out, incidentally, that restaurateurs don’t do what we did at all. In Tokyo, they go to Kappabashi, between Ueno and Asakusa, but there isn’t anything like that in Kyoto. But in Osaka, it seems, there is something called the Dōguya-suji Arcade (道具屋筋), right up from Den Den Town (where you get electronics of all kinds), and this is where you buy everything from plastic food displays to pots to whatever. Of course, if you want the best, you can buy in Kyoto from Aritsugu (有次), in Nishiki Market, but that’s all handmade craftsmanship and you can imagine what the prices are like. You’ll hear more about them when I get around to buying some of their beautiful (and expensive, but worth it) knives.

In passing, let me include the images I used for my header. Here you see some images of Nishiki Market, from the Flickr photostream “One Man’s Perspective,” and one of some Aritsugu knives, from the photostream “Ever Jean.” All these images are Creative Commons licensed for adaptation and the like, and I hope my use is kosher.

Well, anyway, now that I have equipment, I can make food. But my cookbooks are still in transit, so I have to do it all from memory and a few things I can find online. I did some basic Mexican, since avocados are cheaper here than at home (why?), but I had to substitute for cilantro since for some bizarre reason I can’t find any here. I did a very nice miso-cooked mackerel, quite a famous dish, but I forgot to photograph it. And tonight, I’m doing Pacific saury (sanma さんま) sort of en colère, albeit I sort of hacked up the fish and besides it seems rather bony for the approach. On the other hand, I’m making pumpkin (kabocha) cream soup with the local very, very full-fat milk, and there’s mac and cheese for Sam, so all should be fine. I’m also doing a basic Caesar salad, since the eggs here are quite safe for raw use, and besides Sam (the one we’d worry about) doesn’t eat lettuce.

Rather than explain how to hack a fish to bits badly, I’ll end with a quick recipe for pumpkin soup. Next time, with any luck, I’ll manage to document something worth documenting, with photos along the way, and so on.

Pumpkin Soup
You need a couple of cups of skinned, seeded, coarsely chopped pumpkin, yellow squash, acorn squash, or whatever seems fresh. Add some mild stock to cover this; I used fish stock, which I made from the saury bones. Bring the mix to a rapid boil, cover, and simmer fast for 20-30 minutes or so, until the squash is falling to bits. Puree well (I’m using my new toy, an immersion blender), and strain coarsely in case you missed some stringy bits. Bring to a strong simmer and add a cup of fatty milk or cream and a dash of cayenne, whisk thoroughly, and reduce the heat to a medium simmer. You really should then whisk in ½ cup of crème fraîche, but I haven’t seen it yet in Japan so I’m going to use a small amount of warm, finely-cut brie cheese. Add salt and pepper (preferably white) to taste, and serve. You can keep it warm for quite a while, but do not let it come to the boil or it will probably break.

Here’s how dinner came out. The soup in the large bowls is garnished with a little seared sliced mushrooms. The mac and cheese is homemade, but cheese is not readily available in anything resembling quality, so I had to use something labeled "camembert" that tastes like American cheese --- Sam didn't mind. The wine is cheap Euro-plonk from Spain. As you see, I didn't bother with en colère this time (that's where you pull the tail of the fish through the mouth and saute that way), because I'm pretty sure the sanma'd have fallen to bits ; I just floured lightly and seared in a small amount of oil. Tasted good, if a bit bony here and there.
Next time, well, who knows? I'll try to do some restaurant reviews and photos, decent recipes and the like, documentation of my kids eating their way through Kyoto, and of course periodic rambling about Japanese food culture -- and homemaking culture, really, since that's what I'm doing. But I've got no clear plans, exactly. We'll see.