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May 29, 2006

of sake and spit

When making liquor (like sake) from a starchy substance (like rice), the starch must be changed to sugar with the enzyme action of a substance (like saliva).

…Wait, what?

It’s true. The first sake in Japan was made at big rice-chewing parties. Everyone in the village would show up, chew some raw rice, spit it into a container, then go back home, content in the knowledge that they would soon gather for another village party, this time fueled by spit-soaked sake, known as kuchikami no sake, “chewing-in-the-mouth sake.” After the chewing party, water would be added to the saliva-rice and then the mixture would be monitored until it smelled alcoholic—what poor sap had that job? and was he likely to drink the most or least at the party?—at which point, everyone would gather again to drink their very communal concoction.

This type of liquor is not exclusive to Japan; in South and Central America as well as other parts of Asia, people were chewing their way toward drunkenness during the seventh through tenth centuries. In Taiwan, the custom was practiced until the early twentieth century. In Hokkaido and Okinawa, the northernmost and southernmost parts of Japan, they prepared the drink for special festivals and only women chewed the rice.

Luckily, koji was discovered, a useful little mold which not only turned starch into sugar for sake, but also came to be used to make miso, natto and soy sauce. Where would Japan be without you, Aspergillus oryzae?

…Drinking a whole lot of backwash, that’s where.

Posted by anjali at 10:01 PM | Comments (3) | Categories: History | Rice | Sake | Weird

May 27, 2006

kinako pancakes

These pancakes have a nutty taste and more protein and B vitamins than your average pancake. They also have a tendency to stick to the pan, so use a nonstick skillet and butter it a bit before you add the batter. Also, buttermilk is unheard of in Japan, so I use a mixture of whole milk and plain yogurt. You could use a cup of buttermilk instead.

Kinako Pancakes

Makes about 8 4-inch pancakes

3/4 cup all-purpose flour
1/4 cup kinako (toasted soy flour)
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
dash of salt
1/2 cup plain yogurt
1/2 cup whole milk
1 egg
3 Tbs melted butter

Sift the dry ingredients into a bowl. Stir together the yogurt and milk, then add to the flour mixture. Add the egg and butter, then stir to combine. Lumpiness is okay.

Heat a nonstick skillet over a medium-low flame and add some butter or a bit of oil. Pour the batter into the skillet, about a half-cup for each pancake. When the edges of the pancakes look dry, flip them to cook the other side. Keep the finished pancakes warm in a low oven (250°F) until you are done making all of them.

Serve with butter, maple syrup and extra kinako for sprinkling on top.

Posted by anjali at 5:06 PM | Comments (3) | Categories: Recipes | Soy | Sweets

May 26, 2006

taruzake

It used to be all sake was taruzake, sake stored in casks made of Japanese cedar, sugi, which imparts an woody, spicy taste to the drink. Now that sake is usually brewed in enamel-lined stainless steel tanks and stored in glass bottles, the wooden taru casks are only used by a few brewers and taruzake has become a specialty drink usually consumed around New Year’s, often sipped from little boxes also made of cedar. It makes sense as a cold-weather drink; the earthy, cinnamon-like scent and flavor are as comforting as spiced wine. Plus, after spending a winter in Japan, the smell of damp sugi will inevitably remind you of steamy Japanese baths, one of the only places you can actually find warmth during that cold and terrible season.

But the first time I drank taruzake, it was spring. And it wasn’t sake brewed in a wooden cask, but sake stored in a big jar with a piece of fresh sugi floating in it. It was close enough. The sake was a golden yellow and smelled more strongly of wood than I expected. (Indeed, high-end sakes are not used for making today’s taruzake because the wood taste overpowers anything else.) But after my first sip, I was hooked. The woody taste and smell were different from anything I had ever tried before.

I have to admit I was already a big fan of the smell of Japanese wood, which may be why I liked it so much. I have been known to ride my bicycle in the evenings past the factory near my apartment that always seems to emanate either the scent of fresh-cut wood or fragrant wood smoke, just sniffing. Pine is fine, but there’s nothing like the smell of cut sugi or hinoki (Japanese cypress), the latter being an especially popular scent for incense, bath salts and the like in Japan.

I’ve never seen bottled taruzake in the stores, so when I spotted a sugi sake set at a local recycle shop, I quickly snapped it up. Not only is it nice to look at and handle—both the tokkori and the cups are light and smooth—it imparts the perfect amount of cedar scent and flavor, so I can have a sort of homemade taruzake whenever I like.

Posted by anjali at 1:31 PM | Comments (4) | Categories: Rice | Sake

May 22, 2006

the five colors

Standing in the grocery store, I knew I was going to have to buy something yellow before I could leave. My basket held momen (cotton) tofu, kinugoshi (silk) tofu, enoki mushrooms, maitake mushrooms, two cucumbers and a pickled bok-choy-like vegetable. White, white, white, black, green, green. At home, I had some tomatoes and umeboshi: red, red. But I was missing yellow. The omission seemed glaring, as obvious as someone walking around stylishly dressed and pants-less. I wandered the produce section, picked up a shrink-wrapped piece of kabocha, Japanese pumpkin, and headed for the register.

There are five principles of Japanese food which outline the ideal components of every meal. Each principle is a list of five items which should all be present for a nutritionally, visually, spiritually balanced meal, with no single component overpowering the others. It’s a bit intimidating, being someone who grew up on tuna casseroles and simple Thai stir-frys, to remember the meal should, according to go hou (five ways), include an uncooked dish, a grilled dish, a steamed dish, a simmered dish and a fried dish. I haven’t gotten that far yet. I’ve only just mastered the colors.

Go shiki, five colors, says that every meal should include foods that are red, yellow, green, black and white. Not does this ensure visual interest, it also means the meal will be nutritionally balanced, since different colored foods are high in different vitamins and minerals. Since every meal includes rice, white is easy, and with all the green vegetables in the world, so is green. With my recent love of kurogoma, black sesame, it’s not hard to get black into the meal. (Deep purple foods like eggplant and dark brown foods like shiitake mushrooms also qualify as black.) Red is tricky, but I usually pull it off the with help of salmon, tomatoes, umeboshi and radishes. But yellow is always a problem.

There’s kabocha. There’s lemon. There’s a yellow daikon radish pickle called takuan. And there’s corn, which in Japan tops everything from pizza to sushi—and is usually accompanied by giant squirts of mayonnaise, I’m sorry to report. Happy as I am to have mastered go shiki, I draw the line at entering the Land of Corn while on my Japanese food journey. Instead, I’m growing some yellow nasturtiums—edible flowers with a peppery flavor—to use as garnishes for meals missing yellow.

I can’t decide if I’m crazy to think eating flowers makes more sense than eating corn and mayo. Whatever. I eat crab guts. I can draw the line wherever I want.

Posted by anjali at 9:27 PM | Comments (1) | Categories: Principles

May 10, 2006

my first kani miso

My first encounter with kani miso was accidental. It was during my first weeks in Japan, when I would buy things in the grocery store just because they were labeled in hiragana—the Japanese alphabet I could read—instead of kanji, the thousands of complicated Chinese-based characters of which I knew approximately thirty. So when I saw the word kani, crab, I thought I was buying a container of fried crab meat, and it wasn’t until halfway through dinner that I began to detect the muddiness of the flavor, a certain bottom-of-the-sea taste I remembered from an hour-long seafood feast I had eaten in Thailand, encompassing every type of crustacean and mollusk I had ever heard of, and culminating with a plate of prawns swiftly beheaded by the hostess of the meal, the thin green brain fluid pooling on the serving plate, a sight which had ended the meal for me. Looking down at the fried thing in my chopsticks now, I noticed the grayness underneath the batter. What was I eating? I finished the remaining pieces, but vowed to stick with the kare age, fried chicken, next time.

Sitting at the local kaitenzushi (conveyor-belt sushi) restaurant a few weeks later, I watched the approach of a roll stuffed half with crab meat, half with a dollop of some mysterious substance the color of wet cement, with the thick and shiny texture of mayonnaise. (A condiment not out of place at kaitenzushi restaurants, incidentally—hamburger steak and a squirt of mayo balanced atop a small finger of rice, anyone? …Anyone?)

“What is that?” I asked, as my friend James grabbed the plate and added it to the growing pile in front of him.

“Kani miso.”

“But what is it?”

“Crab guts. Want one?”

I hesitated. I didn’t want to look like a wimp. “Okay.”

As he plopped one of the two rolls on my plate, he told me about the first time he had eaten crab guts; it had been at this very kaitenzushi place, on a night when he came alone and sat at the counter, next to an old man presiding over a giant pile of empty plates. I imagined a rainy night, possibly with lightening, and the old man as wizened and dirt-streaked, most likely with a blind, rolling, cataract-ridden eye.

“I reached out to take some kind of clam sushi and I saw he was watching me,” James said. I thought of the darting cataract eye. “So I asked him if the one I picked was any good. He said no”—I could see his cackling, wrinkled face—“but the one he was eating was. So the next time it came around, I tried it. And I liked it.” A flash of lightening! The claw-like hands, curling triumphantly around their disposable chopsticks! A flayed and defeated crab lying supine in the kitchen behind the conveyor belt!

There was still the matter of the kani miso on my plate, and the dawning realization that I had eaten fried crab guts for dinner once.

I picked it up with my chopsticks, the guts glossy in the fluorescent glow of the conveyor belt. I dipped it in my small dish of soy sauce. I ate it. There was the dense crab meat, then the squish of guts between my teeth, the bottom-of-the-sea taste, but even stronger this time, as I chewed through the rice and seaweed wrapping. It tasted like crab, but dirty crab. Like a dirty martini—something dusky and thick beneath the clean sweetness.

“Huh,” I said. There was no flash of lightening. “It’s okay.”

But the next time I went out for kaitenzushi I found myself picking it out of the conveyor-belt line-up, enjoying the disgusted look flickering behind the eyes of those at the table who would never try crab guts, their open-mouthed incredulousness as I popped the pink and gray pieces into my mouth and chewed. “Mmm…” I said, hamming it up in the face of their revulsion, and it actually did taste better than the first time I had eaten it.

And after that, I started eating kani miso for myself.

Posted by anjali at 7:54 PM | Comments (1) | Categories: Firsts | Sushi | Weird

May 7, 2006

making japanese rice

Until kitchens with gas and plumbing became common in the 1920s and ‘30s, housewives in Japan had to cook rice on a wood-burning stove, a complicated process which required maintaining a low flame, then a high flame, then—at exactly the right moment—removing the wood from the fire and finishing the cooking over the coals. All this, and without lifting up the lid to peek, which would have ruined the pressurized conditions needed for the rice to cook properly. This was a jingle used back then to describe the rice-cooking process:

Hajime choro-choro
Naka pa-ppa
Akagao ga naite mo
Futa toru na.

First it bubbles,
Then it hisses.
Even if the baby is crying from hunger,
Never remove the lid!

So housewives would stand patiently over the stove as the rice cooked, using the various sounds and smells coming from the pot to decide when to pull the burning pieces of wood out of the stove. Most likely while wearing a kimono and standing a dirt floor, which was the standard for traditional kitchens. Ye olde Japanese housewives were hardcore.

Nowadays, of course, almost everyone has an electronic rice cooker, which became household staples after they debuted in Japan in 1955. The rice-cooking process is the same—low heat to slowly warm everything inside the pot, then high heat to stew the rice in boiling water, then very low heat to let the grains steam in the remaining water—only now it is monitored by electronics rather than women wielding burning pieces of wood. I guess that’s what they call progress.

Japanese rice is short-grained and more sticky than the long-grained rice eaten in countries like Thailand and India, which makes it easier to eat with chopsticks. The ideal Japanese rice is tender, full-flavored, glossy and moist; to achieve this, the rice must be thoroughly washed before cooking to remove all surface starch. Measure your rice into a bowl, cover it with water, swish the rice around until the water becomes cloudy, pour off the water and repeat the process until the water runs clear, usually after four to six rinsings. You can save the starchy water for watering your plants (which I do) or boiling vegetables. After the final washing, drain the rice into a mesh colander and let the excess water drip away for a minute or two.

When cooking Japanese rice, the official water-to-raw-rice ratio is 1.2:1, but, in addition to preferring whole numbers to fractions, I prefer rice that is a little more stiff and sticky, so I use a 1:1 ratio. Also, I get my rice from a teacher at school who has a rice field, and I find her rice is a little less dry than store-bought rice. (I know, rice from a real field! It’s a novelty I still appreciate.) Rice is harvested in the fall and the grains gradually lose their moisture during the course of the year, so they are their driest at the end of the summer, and you may have to add extra water then.

Japanese Cooked White Rice

Note: I always use my rice cooker when making rice, so the stovetop directions are based on the instructions in Washoku by Elizabeth Andoh.

Makes 2 cups cooked rice

1 cup Japanese-style white rice, washed
1 cup water (or 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons for drier rice grains)

If you have a rice cooker: Place the rice and water in the cooker and start it. Once the active cooking cycle is over, make sure the rice remains in the cooker for 10 minutes, lid closed, to steam the grains. This ensures the proper texture. Stir the rice before serving.

If you don’t have a rice cooker: …You should get one. It’s worth it. In the meantime, put the rice in a straight-sided pot with a lid. Let it sit in the water for 10 minutes to absorb some moisture.

Place the pot on high heat and bring to a boil, which should take 3 to 5 minutes. Don’t open the lid; instead pretend you are a Japanese housewife and listen for the sounds of boiling (choro-choro) and look for the steam chattering the pot lid.

Reduce the heat to low and cook for about 5 minutes or until you hear a low hissing sound, indicating that the water is almost absorbed. If you have to peek, now is the time to do it, but replace the lid quickly. Increase the heat to high for 30 seconds to dry off the rice.

Remove the pot from the heat and let the rice steam for 10 minutes with the lid on. Stir before serving. There will probably be a crusty, browned layer of rice in the bottom of the pot. This is a delicacy in many rice-eating countries. In Japan, it’s called okage. You should eat it, either by mixing it in with the rest of the rice when you stir, or by itself, sprinkled with a little salt.

Posted by anjali at 5:18 PM | Comments (2) | Categories: History | Recipes | Rice

May 3, 2006

the reinvention of sushi

The first version of sushi, called narezushi (“matured sushi"), was originally a method of preserving large amounts of fish caught at the same time. It was made by spreading a layer of boiled rice on the bottom of a wooden cask, then covering it with a layer of salted fish, more layers of rice and fish, an inner lid, a stone weight and water to the top of the container. After about six months, the rice would ferment and lend a tangy flavor to the fish, which was eventually removed from the rice remains, sliced and eaten raw. You might call it the cheese of the fish world. (Or you might just call it gross. And really, I can’t blame you.) Narezushi, versions of which exist all over Southeast Asia, has been made in Japan for the past 1,000 years and is still being made in the Lake Biwa area, though no information exists as to why.

Around the fifteenth century, namanare-zushi (“raw-mature sushi”) appeared. It was the fast-food version of narezushi, ready to eat after fermenting for several days to a month. In that amount of time, the rice would ferment enough to take on an acidic taste, but still remain whole, and was eaten along with the fish. Unlike narezushi, it was only made in small quantities, usually for festivals and other special events.

In the late seventeeth century, someone thought, “Wait—this is still kind of gross. Why don’t we just add some vinegar to the rice instead of packing it in a box for a month?” and thus hayazushi (“quick sushi”) was born. It was later popularized in Edo as a snack food called nigiri-zushi, which is the sushi we eat today.

Posted by anjali at 9:24 PM | Comments (4) | Categories: History | Sushi

kinako

Kinako is toasted soybean flour or, as I thought of it for the first few months in Japan, that weird powder they always put on mochi. It has a nutty flavor that reminds me a bit of peanut butter, especially when I sprinkle it on buttered toast, which is a favorite way to eat it here. Mixing it with some brown sugar and cinnamon before putting it on the toast makes a more substantial version of plain cinnamon-and-sugar-topped toast, but, since my prime kinako-toast-eating time is right after work, I am usually too lazy to do more than just dole it straight out of the bag. Kinako is also good as a yogurt or ice cream topping, especially when that ice cream is additionally topped with an (sweet bean jam). According to the back of my kinako package, it also makes a nutritious drink when mixed with milk, but I'll have to take their word for it since the thought of drinking a tall glass of milk always makes me want to gag. Unless there are brownies involved. I'm willing to make a lot of exceptions for brownies.

Kinako on toasted azuki-bean bread.

Since it is made of ground and toasted soybeans, kinako is full of protein, B vitamins and other soy-licious things, so in addition to finding it at Japanese or Asian grocery stores, you can also find it at natural foods stores.

Pocky has a kinako flavor, but unfortunately it was only in stores during the That Weird Powder phase, so I haven't tried it.

Some kinako recipes:
Kinako pancakes
Kinako ice cream
Kinako frosting

Posted by anjali at 4:24 PM | Comments (5) | Categories: Ingredients | Soy | Sweets