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April 26, 2007

ikasumi soft-serve is the new black

Sea salt and citrus soft-serve ice cream.

You can find soft-serve ice cream everywhere in Japan. It is based on this simple equation: where you find tourists, you find vendors selling soft-serve. Where you find anything at all worth seeing, you find tourists. Every place in Japan boasts something worth seeing. Therefore, soft-serve is everywhere. This is a good thing.

Vanilla, strawberry and matcha are the standards, but the best part about soft-serve in Japan is its use as a vehicle for all manner of seasonal, regional and barely-edible ingredients, meaning that any decent tourist attraction will have its own special flavor. I like to try them all. I look it less as gluttony and more as a hobby, like collecting stamps. Except with nothing to show for it but some torn cone wrappers and a small ice cream belly.

Squid ink soft-serve ice cream.

Many soft-serve flavors I've tried have been both strange and delicious, like houji-cha (roasted green tea), shionami (sea salt), umeboshi, and tomato. Others have been less weird but just as good, like kuri (chestnut), iyokan (a kind of citrus fruit) and sakura (cherry blossom). Only one flavor was bad enough to force me to abandon the cone: ikasumi (squid ink), purchased at a stall near the famous Tsukiji Fish Market in Tokyo. I remember it tasted almost like chocolate, but there was something wrong beneath the almost-chocolate, a shadowy squid taste lurking below the surface which drove me to abandon ship.

What makes all these flavors so easy to eat is the fact that it is soft-serve (sofuto kuriimu in Japanese) rather than regular ice cream. If I had to maneuver around chunks of frozen tomato, I don't think I'd be as happy as I am eating a cone of something smooth and yielding that tastes faintly of tomatoes. (If you are wondering, this particular soft-serve reminds me of a fresh mozzarella and tomato salad, but sweet, of course.) The cutting-edge of food is all about changing the textures of familiar foods into something more unexpected, but foams and flavored papers are nothing next to Japan's national program of soft-serving everything under the Rising Sun. I'll toast my cone of kinako to that.

Posted by anjali at 12:57 AM | Comments (10) | Categories: Musings | Sweets | Weird | Western Food

April 4, 2007

shin-shōga (young ginger)

It's early April, the sakura are in full bloom, and spring is in the air. Except that it's raining right now and an icy wind is blowing all the blossoms off the trees. Oh well, at least I have my shin-shōga. Shōga is your average piece of ginger, brown-skinned and sharp, and shin-shōga is its younger, springtime version, pale, thin-skinned and mild. It's this ginger, sliced and pickled, that is mounded up next to the green plastic leaf in your box of lunchtime sushi.

But pickles are only the beginning for shin-shōga. Because it has the fresh astringency of ginger without the bite, you can use it raw, and it is especially tasty when julienned and added to salads. When cooked, it loses its bright crunch, but the delicate fragrance wafting up from any dish you've added it to makes up for it. With soups and rice, you can toss in the shin-shōga right at the end of cooking and let it soften a bit in the residual heat. That's what I do when making this early-spring rice, a mix of young ginger, fresh crab and thin green onions.

Some notes about ingredients: Young ginger is a popular ingredient in other Asian cuisines, so you should be able to find it at Asian supermarkets from spring through early summer. I buy my cooked crab meat in the sashimi section of my local grocery store, where I sometimes want to cry when I see how beautiful and cheap everything is. Imitation crab meat is not a suitable substitute. Finally, the green onions in Japan are typically much thinner than in the U.S., about half the diameter; look for the thinnest you can find or just use one thick one.

Kani to shin-shōga gohan (Crab and young ginger rice)

Makes 2 servings

1 cup Japanese rice, washed and drained
2-inch (5-cm) piece of young ginger
3.5 oz (100 g) cooked crab meat
2 thin green onions

Cook the rice in a rice cooker or on the stovetop as usual. (See the directions for cooking Japanese rice here.) When the rice is almost cooked, peel the ginger, cut in half crosswise, and julienne. Thinly slice the green onion. When the rice is cooked, add the ginger, crab and green onion to the cooker or pot and stir to mix everything in. For best flavor, serve immediately.

Posted by anjali at 10:27 PM | Comments (4) | Categories: Ingredients | Recipes | Rice | Spring