I don't know what the lyrics of this Japanese song mean, but watching a bunch of people prance around in super happy sushi costumes is captivating enough on its own. Whether or not watching this video will increase sushi consumption is yet to be determined.
Watch the video, after the jump.
Culinary Abortions from Japan is a hilarious blog written by a Canadian documenting the food failures of Japan—"failures" including off-putting flavors, poorly named items, excessive packaging, or all of the above.
While the wrongness of these foods may mostly be culturally relative, I can't argue against individually wrapped cashews joining the list. It's not like the cashew is a giant mutant worthy of its own bag; the description reads, "Aside from a light gown of salt, it rests naked within its deplorable womb of plastic."
I suppose it's good if you have a major portion-control problem, though.
Curiosly Ravenous has a shot of what's essentially a bento set meal, minus the box. It's austerely and elegantly Japanese in its own right. Here you see "shiozake (salted salmon), asparagus in dashi broth with egg, and steamed rice topped with furikake (rice seasoning)." Be sure to click through to Curiously Ravenous for the salmon recipe.
Matthew Amster-Burton explores the world of okonomiyaki-making with chef Johnathan Hunt at Boom Noodle in Seattle. Prior to opening Boom, Hunt had never heard of the dish, often described as a Japanese pizza pancake,* but now it's the best-selling appetizer on the menu. Amster-Burton surmised that it must be easy to make if a noob could go for zero to hero with it. In his piece on Gourmet.com, he gives some pointers on doing it yourself.
* I hate using that shorthand for okonomiyaki, but everybody does it, eh? As a pizza nut, I'd like to point out that it's NOTHING LIKE PIZZA. That's like calling a Belgian waffle with strawberries and cream a "pizza" simply because it's a round, flat thing topped with something.
The Grocery Ninja leaves no aisle unexplored, no jar unopened, no produce untasted. Creep along with her below, and read her past market missions here.
I don’t know about you, but filing my taxes has left me feeling kind of like the last prune in the bottom of the box—all dried out with icky crystallized sugar on top. Coincidentally (or perhaps not), rice recipes have been showing up everywhere—probably because everyone’s feeling a bit pinched on the money side of things, and rice is one of the most filling and affordable foods to be had for the money.
I doubt you guys need another recipe on how to cook rice, but how about drinking it? There are rice milks, alcohol, and those incredible sweet rice-based drinks Amazake, Sikhye, and Morro Horchata. But they’re all too involved for me in my ripped-off state. I don’t want to spend too much time at the stove, because that will lead to me angsting about holes in my pockets, stirring spoon in hand. Instead, all I want to do is be able to just add water.
Katsu, katsu, and more katsu
Sushi and udon are popular Japanese dishes, but have you ever eaten Napolitan spaghetti (spaghetti rinsed in cold water and stir-fried with vegetables in ketchup) or menchi katsu (deep-fried breaded hamburger) at a Japanese restaurant? The New York Times profiles yoshoku cuisine, the Japanese take on Western food that originated in the mid-1850s and has since become an integral part of Japanese cuisine. Besides ketchup-ed spaghetti and deep-fried hamburger, yoshoku cuisine includes curry (thick and stew-like), omu rice (an omelet stuffed with ketchup-flavored rice), and tonkatsu (deep-fried pork cutlet).
I've never thought of making those super-thin omelets (usuyaki tamago) you sometimes find in Japanese dishes—I assumed reaching that thinness would take more skill than I possess—but Biggie at bento-making tutorial site Lunch In A Box shows the easy way to make them by cooking them in your microwave. With an appropriately-shaped plate and plastic wrap (Biggie includes information about the safety of microwaving plastic wrap), you'll be churning out these egg sheets in no time. Chop up the egg sheets to use as a garnish or keep them whole to use as wrappers around other foods.
Of course, you can make these without a microwave; go to Just Hungry for directions on how to make them in a pan.
The Grocery Ninja leaves no aisle unexplored, no jar unopened, no produce untasted. Creep along with her below, and read her past market missions here.
I’ve been craving these jellies for ages and went hunting for them this weekend, certain that with globe-trotting food trends, I’d find them sitting pretty next to the Taiwanese bubble tea hut, or the Korean fro-yo stand. But several jelly-less hours later, I was forced to concede that not only are these jellies nowhere near as popular as they are in Asia, they aren’t available at all! What gives?
Konnyaku jellies are a wobbly, vegan treat made from the starchy root of the konjac plant, a yamlike tuber that’s also called devil's tongue, voodoo lily, snake palm, or elephant yam. When flavored with hijiki seaweed and sans sugar, konnyaku plays a laudable role in Japanese hotpots or oden.
Clockwise from top left: The Velvet Underground & Nico by The Velvet Underground, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb by U2, There Is Nothing Left to Lose by Foo Fighters, and Green Album by Weezer.
Tired of seeing bento boxes that merely look cute? Jacket Lunch Box is a Japanese blog dedicated to making bento boxes that resemble popular album covers. All it takes is the magic of carefully cut nori, kamabako, ham, shredded cabbage, and more, all atop a bed of rice. [Thanks to Sera for the heads up.]
Previously: Bento Boxes on Flickr, Year of the Pig Bento, How to Pack a Bento Box, Character Bento Competition Winner
Omu-rice and pork cutlet curry.
You may not think of fried mashed potato patties or beef stew served with rice when craving Japanese food, but these dishes of Western origins are popular in Japanese cuisine. Mari Kanazawa of Watashi to Tokyo explains the origins of some of these Japanese-Western dishes and where you're most likely to find them in Tokyo.
Pretz is a popular Japanese snack in the form of a pretzel-like stick that mostly comes in savory flavors. Like many Japanese snack commercials, the advertising for Pretz is...unique. Sumo wrestlers, geishas, and dancing scientists are just some of the characters used to illustrate the awesomeness of this snack.
Watch five examples after the jump.
A caterpillar and his son just want to eat best tea leaves at the top of the plant. Is that too much to ask for?
Yes. But at least they give it a good shot. Watch the drama unfold, after the jump.
I've heard of chicken soup to heal colds, but sake and egg? Tamagozake, or egg sake, is a traditional home remedy in Japan for the cold. Mix together 3/4th cup of sake, an egg, and a tablespoon of sugar and heat until just before boiling. Serve with chopsticks. And let the healing begin! [via Peter Payne]
If a specially licensed Japanese chef doesn't correctly cut fugu—a potentially fatally poisonous blowfish—he could kill the diner. If you ever order fugu, just hope your chef is as skilled as the one above.
Watch the fugu go from whole fish to plated dish after the jump. A warning for the squeamish: The fish is prepared while it's still alive. [via growabrain]
Don't leave your children alone at the kitchen table with a plate of spaghetti—they may be harassed by a rotating army of monstrously huge Kewpie-faced bean-shaped fish eggs, accompanied by a catchy theme song.
I've had the song stuck in my head for about two and a half years. After the jump, I bestow the joy onto you.
Perhaps the best use of two dollars, Meiji's Kinoko No Yama ("mountain mushrooms"), are found at even the most average Japanese market. The chocolate cap and biscuit-like cracker stem harmonize wonderfully. And the chocolate-to-cracker ratio is spot on. While the milk chocolate isn't great quality, similar to Glico's Pocky, there's something about the chocolate's density that offsets the cracker stem perfectly.
A tree that grows donuts and baked foods? Have all my wildest dreams finally come true?
...Alas, it's just a backdrop in Japanese clothing label Candystripper's photo shoot of their 2007 winter collection. After looking at the series, I crave donuts more than clothing. [via Fops and Dandies]
Moyashimon is a Japanese anime series about Tadayasu Sawaki, a first-year college student at an agricultural university who is blessed (or cursed) with the gift of being able to communicate with microbes. Naturally, these microbes are small, cuddly, bouncy, fat creatures with emotive faces and squeaky childlike voices.
At the end of every episode the microbes star in their own "Microbe Theater" segment. After the jump, check out Episode 5, which features the microbes that ferment alcohol. [Thanks to Gordon Mark for the heads up!]
The opening to Japanese anime series Honey and Clover has little to do with the plot of the series (a group of art students figuring out what to do with their lives), but it features food being arranged and animated in creative ways as a homage to stop-motion animator Jan Švankmajer. After watching the Honey and Clover intro, check out Švankmajer's surreal films. [Thanks to John for the heads up.]
I'm not exactly sure what's going on here. Can any Japanese readers explain? Video
Wafuu pasuta is the name given to Italian pasta dressed with Japanese ingredients. If you're tired of tomato sauce, try these wafuu pasuta recipes from Just Hungry. Tarako and ponzu capellini, anyone?
Harris Salat of The Japanese Food Report shares his detailed notes on the classic preparation of rice according to master chef Yoshio Maruyama of Kyoto. " Preparing rice in Japan is well, more than just preparing rice. Cooking this grain the traditional way reflects a sense of ajiwai, the ability to get the most out of the natural flavor of a particular ingredient - the essence of Japanese cuisine."
I've never wanted to make my own gummy candy on a plastic stick until I set my eyes on the eye-searingly vibrant, colorful, happy packaging of Naru-Naru Mi Ni Naru. In Anjali's review of the candy—which she christens the Magical Gummy Wand—she directs us through the process of combining a green plastic stick, various powders and water to make a green plastic stick with baby gummy nodules sticking out of it. And what a magical process it is:
The instructions clearly show Powder 1 being added to the water, but since I had already dumped the powder into the tray so I could take a picture, I added the water to the powder, which caused a silty layer of Powder 1 to remain stubbornly undissolved at the bottom, no matter how assiduously I stirred with the Magical Gummy Wand. For some reason, I thought tilting the tray a bit might help, but all it did was dump some of the water-powder mixture into Powder 2, creating a disturbing bright pink crater which immediately began to coagulate into a gelled mess. I covered it with more Powder 2 and tried to pretend like it didn't exist.
Anjali eventually gets the gummy pods to successfully propagate on her plastic wand, but it sounds like the candy takes some practice to master.
You can read fun Japanese candy reviews every Friday on Anjali's blog, Giant Jeans Parlor.
InventorSpot give their list of the Top Ten Weird and Bizarre Japanese Drinks as proof that Japan is at the forefront of beverage ingenuity. Do you dream of cucumber-flavored Pepsi? They've got it! How about salad flavored water? Got that too! Kids want to join in on the beer-drinking fun? Just give them a frosty bottle of non-alcoholic Kidsbeer!
If you have a local Japanese supermarket ("browsing supermarkets" is one of my major pastimes, at least) be on the lookout for "interesting drinks that probably wouldn't survive in the US market." There are loads of them. Check out Dan's photos of bizarre Japanese beverages for inspiration.
The Washington Post's food section had a fun and informative interview with Trevor Corson, author of The Zen of Fish: The Story of Fish, from Samurai to Supermarket
Lee Hefter, Wolfgang Puck's right-hand man and the executive chef at Spago Beverly Hills and the steakhouse Cut, visits Japan for a week every year for inspiration and goes home with new ideas on how to prepare the food at his restaurants—on a previous trip, a meal at a Tokyo restaurant where a steak can cost $1,400 gave him the idea for the ultra-high temperature plus wood smoke process he uses on his steaks back in Los Angeles. This March, two LA Times reporters tagged along to document the experience; Hefter gets tips on where to eat from chefs like Nobu Matsuhisa and Masa Takayama and does a lot of research, so if you're visiting Japan anytime soon do your tastebuds a favor and take the list of restaurants from his trip along with you!
Fans of Japanese food, take note: One of Hefter's favorite places is a small tempura bar, where the chef treats the frying like art. Hefter says, pityingly, "It's amazing how many people go through life thinking they've had tempura," and I believe him. From the sounds of it, I've never really had tempura myself, and I've been to Japan. Perhaps more surprisingly, he only had sushi once on his trip, at an eight-stool sushi bar without a glass case or a list of fish to choose from because the chef only serves seafood that are in season.
One of my favorite fish dishes is black cod marinated in miso, as made famous by Nobu's Nobuyuki Matsuhisa, and Rasa Malaysia's just posted a recipe for it, inspired by the Nobu Cookbook. I hadn't realized it was so simple to make—the marinade is just four ingredients, and the most complicated step is leaving the fish in it overnight—but now that I know, I'm going to be giving it a try for dinner this week. You should too!
Slate's Jacob Weisberg breaks down the growing ubiquity of green tea: "In China and Japan, green tea is a hot drink usually served in a small ceramic cup. But to American commercial culture, green tea is yoga in a bottle—or in a can, candy bar, candle, lotion, soap, perfume, pill, or extract. Described as soothing and gentle, it sits paradoxically at the red-hot intersection of New Age health mania and industrial chemistry."
As an example, Weisberg points out that if you're drinking the Tazo Green Tea Frappucino at Starbucks for any other reason other than taste like, say, your health, you're delusional—the venti size has a whopping 560 calories, and that's without whipped cream. [via Amy's Robot]
If you like sushi and want everyone to know it, this is the tie for you! Mmmm, sushi. $34 at Uncommon Goods.
[via swissmiss]
Cooking Cute made this amazing Year of the Pig bento the other day: "salmon-rice sushi shaped like little piggies, hotdog flowers with carrot-star centers, kamaboko fans, tricolor swirled sushi made from three flavors of sticky rice, sweet sticky rice flowers, pig-shaped spam nigiri, and a pig-shaped egg."
Someone please make me one of these for lunch today? Thanks!
Our Adam Kuban loves Japanese curry rice, which is super popular both in Japan and in Japanese restaurants outside of Japan, but did you know there was such a thing as Japanese dry curry? According to Maki Itoh, it's "fried rice with curry flavor, almost as popular. And unlike the stew-type of Curry Rice it’s very fast and easy to put together."
"Isn’t it wonderful to live in a country where drunken panda-seals lounge on peanut snack packages sniffing beer? Well, not all Japanese packaging is that weird, but see for yourself. Here is PingMag’s Best of Snack Characters. Enjoy!"
MOS Burger is a fast food restaurant chain in Japan. In fact, it's the second biggest chain there after McDonald's, but look at how minimalist their packaging design is compared to the garishness you expect from McDonald's or other chains like Burger King, KFC and Pizza Hut.
A girl with a paper cat mask on has lunch at the cafeterias of major Japanese companies (Motorola, Hitachi, Unisys, etc) and posts her photos. She works for ZDNet Japan. The site is completely in Japanese. I am not making any of this up. It's awesome.
[via roboppy del.icio.us]
If you liked the look of the bento boxes we featured last week and are thinking about making your first foray into making one for yourself, Maki Itoh wrote two posts recently that should help you get started on making onigiri, the rice balls that are a classic in bento box lunches: Onigiri (Omusubi) revisited: An easier way to make Japanese rice balls, step by step and More about onigiri: keeping them fresh and more.
The Great Natto Diet Rush: The sticky road to weight loss (maybe). Maki Itoh discusses natto's sudden trendiness in Japan as a potential weight loss wonder food—somewhat bizarre news when you consider that natto is a very stinky dish of cooked, fermented soybeans, the kind of food that even the Japanese will refer to as "an acquired taste".
(Masaharu Morimoto won the Iron Chef Natto Battle with an array of dishes that included a dessert of "sweetened natto soaked in Coca Cola and served in coconut milk", which to be frank, I find terrifying. Brave man to make it, but trusting judges to eat it!)
Adam Kuban's recent curry rice feature prompted a few commenters to fret about MSG, a phenomenon that always reminds me of the essay from Jeffrey Steingarten's collection It Must've Been Something I Ate, in which he points out that a) the Chinese, who eat MSG every day, are not suffering from debilitating headaches en masse, and b) foods like Parmesan cheese and ketchup contain enough free glutamate to trigger headaches in people who say they're affected by MSG but no one ever complains about them.
The Guardian's Alex Renton wrote a great article two years ago about the mythology of MSG that goes from the discovery of umami, to the mass production of MSG, to the 1968 article that triggered the spurious conflation of MSG with Chinese Restaurant Syndrome. From the piece: "Science has still not found a convincing explanation for CRS: indeed, some researchers suggest it may well be to do with the other things diners have imbibed there - peanuts, shellfish, large amounts of lager. Others say that fear of MSG is a form of mass psychosis - you suffer the symptoms you've been told to worry about." Renton himself experiments with the stuff, to hilarious results.
Looking at Flickr's bento boxes group, with its thousands upon thousands of photos of neatly arranged, self-packed and often incredibly cute lunches, has got to be one of my favorite ways to start the week. Even the dreariest Monday is somehow easier to face when you know there are people in the world making crabs out of hotdogs and Ms Pacman out of egg and seaweed.
(The Totoro dust mote-shaped onigiri in the photo at right almost make me wish I had to go into an office every day, just so I'd have an excuse to make them!)
Several years ago, before I had even heard the word izakaya, I was fond of going to seasonal sake tasting parties at New York City's Sakagura. They were a great way to learn about sake. An izakaya is a Japanese pub or casual eating and drinking establishment. It translates roughly to "place where sake is"—basically a spot for serious eating and drinking. In Japan, izakaya are popular with salarymen looking to unwind and enjoy a drink and a bite after work. The drinks of choice are beer, sake and shochu, a vodka-type spirit distilled from various kinds of grains. The fare is mostly small plates, which are ordered as the mood strikes at any point during the evening. Typical items, which are then shared among those at the table, are skewers of grilled meat, sashimi, grilled fish, pickles, fried chicken, savory snacks like fried lotus root chips and bits of dried fish. These days in New York, there are more than half a dozen izakaya in the Saint Marks vicinity, several farther uptown, and now one in Brooklyn's Williamsburg.
Foodblogs, as a rule, are borne of passion. I have explored pizza and hamburgers in passionate and mind-numbing detail on Slice and A Hamburger Today, respectively, but if I were forced to create yet another foodblog, I'd depart from the path of iconic American foods and look toward the East. That's because my third-favorite food is the Japanese-style curry known as "curry rice." For what it's worth, I actually did create a third blog to explore my other food passions, but it was short-lived; this ode to curry rice is from that site, but I thought I'd share it with you here on Serious Eats, as it's a perfect wintertime comfort food.
Not yet available in the U.S., this device takes the Egg Muffin maker concept to the next level with the addition of a coffee maker.
Here's an an ingenious way to make a complete breakfast at home without having to inundate your kitchen with single-use appliances. This new product from Japanese company Chuo Sangyo lets you make coffee, eggs, and toast all in one breath. It only takes 10 minutes and one outlet. Amazing.
One Machine Makes Toast, Eggs, and Coffee [TokyoMango]
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