Kati's Culinary Corner

We move now from sumo to a matter of almost equal importance and enjoyment: Food! 

First to the painful issue of ordering food. Most restaurants I have come across, do not have any information in English at the front to reveal, what exactly they are serving. So if you are looking for, say a sushi place, you may have to walk in quite a few curtained front doors before you strike lucky. In fact the places you suspected were restaurants may turn out to be beauty parlours or buddhist retreats, since many shops and restaurants don't have front windows to peek in at. Once you have managed to find a restaurant, you may end up being equally stuck with ordering. Pointing at someone elses food is a good method, but only works, if there is someone else in situ with food in front of them. So often the process involves a bit of pantomime and staring hypnotically into the waiters face and willing him to understand. Sometimes the situation gets stuck. Yesterday I had to walk out of the first restaurant I tried, because my willing-you-to-understand superpower was out of order. So when eating out, you just have to take pot luck.

A few restaurants make things considerably easier by having plastic replica portions in the front window. Then it's merely a matter of taking a photo and showing it to the waiters to get the correct meal, whatever it turns out to be.

Exhibit A: Plastic replica of something I ordered, which turned out to be really tasty.

And of course you can always get stuff from the store. Sometimes appropriately packaged as at Osaka train station, where they had lunch boxes in the shapes of all the Shinkansen bullet trains, Exhibit B

Now to the food itself. I have always had the impression, that the one really good food to come out of Japan is sushi. So let's see what the verdict is now, that I've had a week and more to chew on the matter. 

I admit I dislike greasy food. So fried, especially deep fried things, crisps etc. are something I avoid. Unfortunately this automatically leaves tempura out of my wish-list. But if light, airy, crispy, battered items are your thing, you'll do just fine here. And you can make tempura out of just about anything, as shown below in:

Exhibit C: leaf-tempura for breakfast at the Buddhist monastery Shojoshin-in.

In the department of things less greasy, the big sellers seem to be silky udon noodles in broth and ramen, which is basically udon except the noodles are less silky. Udon and ramen are both really pleasing comfort food, no sharp edges, no need to chew, just let those thick silky noodles slide down your throat and try not to think about worms. 

I do enjoy a good udon now and then. However the best way to describe the taste is umami. It's no coincidence that it was the Japanese who first discovered the primary taste of umami to expand the baseline from just bitter, sweet, salty or sour. Anyway, umami is a softly rounded, squishy, unobtrusive and comforting taste, somewhat like sucking the corner of a wet blanket. And if Japanese food is big on anything, it's umami. Udon and ramen being good examples of this, but by no means unique.

Of course there are lots of foodstuffs I haven't tried - and in fact don't intend to either. They could be named "the department of just plain weird". Such as the vacuum packed slices of pigs trotters on the left in this image. Look at those little bones sticking out temptingly. Just the thing for a family outing. And hanging next to them something, which was either a pickled baby shark or a roasted pig's penis - and I certainly wasn't going any closer to investigate.

Exhibit D: Department of odd, vacuum packed stuff in a Hiroshima food store.

When it comes to deserts and sweet stuffs the sad part of my story really starts. All through Asia, I find that the taste that least coincides with Western tastes are sweet stuffs. A Japanese speciality are green tea deserts. Green tea ice-cream, green tea chocolate, green tea cookies... you name it, they have it. These are certainly not my cup of tea! 

However my true nemesis, which has haunted me throughout Asia is the red bean. Any time you bite into a tempting pastry that smells divine, you run the risk of biting deep into red bean paste. Some things are just not meant to be - and beans in the desert is one of them!

Oh, and happy birthday mum! Thinking of you, but you can be relieved, that I'm not baking you a Japanese birthday cake!

So how do I stand now on Japanese cousine? An occasional umami-moment with udon or ramen is great, but I still think sushi's the best thing around.