greg cooks

nourishing the body

Japanese

Living on the edge with Fugu

After a day spent at the Tokyo Institute of Technology my hosts took me out for dinner at a local favorite of theirs. This being the start of winter , Fugu is the specialty of the season. Last night’s meal was all about this dangerous fish. If you don’t know, Fugu is the Japanese name for the pufferfish. This fish contains a very deadly toxin in its organs and sometimes in its skin called tetrodotoxin. This is a neurotoxin that can paralyze your muscles. If your diaphram becomes paralyzed you will suffocate – all while being fully conscious. Fugu is highly prized in Japan due to its inherint danger. Chefs must have special training to cut the fish to avoid contaminating the edible parts.

It seems every meal in Japan starts with beer but quickly moves to sake. This 1.8 liter bottle was barely enough for us! Now I do like sake and I am always surprised at how many different sakes there are all with their unique flavors.

Japanese meals often start with a sashimi course. Last night I was treated to my favorite – raw crab! If you’ve never tried it, you must. It is absolutely the sweetest sashimi I have ever tasted.

Next we each had a tray full of various appetizers I don’t know what everything was but it was all very tasty. I know we had some snails, some mushrooms, the thing on the bottom right was a most delicious oyster, and on the bottom left – lotus root.

Now comes the Fugu! First up was a fugu tempura – lightly battered and crisp on the outside, delicious and soft on the inside. It tasted like fish, of course, so I don’t know if the taste is really anything special.

The main meal was a hot pot cooked at the table. Here it is before everything was cooked. Inside there are pieces of fugu, vegetables, tofu, mushrooms and cellophane noodles. The pieces of the fugu are carefully cut so as to enjoy the most tender cartilage near the bones. I have to say the fish cooked this was was absolutely delectable.

Even the fins of the fish are used in a special sake drink called Fugu Hire-zake. They slightly char the fin and place it on top of the sake in the cup. When it is served at the table the ignite the cup with a flame briefly to impart a very interesting smell and taste to the sake. This sake was served warm and tasted very interesting with the charred fin flavor infusing the sake.


Japanese meals usually end with a rice course and a soup. The rice tonight was served in the form of a crab maki roll. I’m not quite sure but I think the curled round pieces in the soup was the skin of the fugu. This night we ended with pineapple and sort of a coconut jello pudding.



So, I enjoyed the fugu very much and I lived to tell the tale! Next time I must try fugu sashimi.

Sendai Beef, and I do mean beef

On Monday I had the good fortune to be treated to a very nice Sendai meal. Even in a small country like Japan regional cuisines abound. In Sendai the local favorite is Sendai beef. Of course they try to rival Kobe beef and I have to say my meal I had recently with my hosts in Sendai was incredible. They brought me to a restaurant that specialized in Sendai beef cooked Korean style on a table gas flame grill. They eat many parts of the cow here and one of the most prized parts here in Sendai is the tongue. Here you can see beef tongue being grilled. I found the taste to be quite good but the texture was a little tough.

After the tongue was all gone, they brought out a plate of nicely marbled meat. This was more to my liking and it was tender and delicious.

Now the thing that makes beef tender and tasty is how well marbled it is with fat. Take a look at the fine grain marbling of this shoulder cut of beef. It was melt in your mouth tender!

Next came the ribs. These were also quite good.

After all that meat I thought we were done until they brought out yet another plate. I said they eat all parts of the animal. This is marinated liver and intestines. They also tasted pretty good but I’m not much of a liver eater. I found the intestines to be very chewy. I guess it’s good exercise for your jaws.

Sendai Eats

On Sunday I traveled from Narita to the Tokyo station and then took a shinkansen fast train to Sendai. Here is the local Narita station on a beautiful sunny morning

Here is the Tokyo station shinkansen platform. See everyone queuing up for their cars? You have to know the Japanese system in order to understand it. Instead of questioning it you jut have to go with the flow and everying is ok.


On the way to Sendai it is apparent that every inch of space is utilized in Japan.

Near Sendai you an see mountains in the distance.

They are crazy for this game here.

This is a food blog, after all. So I guess I should talk about some food. Below the Sendai train station there are many restaurants. I found one in particular that did not have a picture menu. I had to drag my server outside to point at the food I wanted in order to place my order. As you can see I found some pretty good shrimp tempura and noodle soup for a very reasonable 880 yen. That’s less than $10 US. Pretty good deal.

Onigiri

I’ve just arrived in Japan for a two week trip. I am looking forward to many wonderful Japanese meals while I’m here. But after being up for 24 hours and finally getting to my hotel jetlagged and stuffed full of awful airline food, I was not in the mood for a fancy restaurant meal. Fortunately the Japanese have convenience stores on just about every corner. I grabbed a quick snack before I passed out from jetlag. A Sapporo and a couple of onigiri hit the spot. Onigiri is a rice ball, usually stuffed with something, wrapped in a crispy sheet of seaweed. The packaging is ingenious as it has layers of plastic to separate the nori from the rice so that it does not get wet and soggy. You peel the package open from top to bottom then pull the two corners and the plastic pops off. You end up with a perfectly wrapped onigiri. I had one with shrimp and one with tuna inside. Wash that down with some good Japanese beer and you can’t ask for much more.

Sushi and more

I was in the mood for Japanese cuisine and it’s been a while since I’ve made sushi rolls. They really are not that hard to make and you can put whatever you want inside. These are stuffed with crab, avocado, carrots and cucmbers.

Of course the most important aspect of sushi is the rice. Unfortunately I didn’t have a great sushi rice on hand but at least I had a sticky shorter grain rice. Actually it was too sticky and became a bit gelatinous, but it was ok. Sushi rice preparation is something that is almost an art in Japan. Right out of the steamer, while still hot, the rice is seasoned with rice vinegar usually sweetened with some sugar. The rice is traditionally cooled by fanning by hand. I like to lay out a thin layer of rice about 3/4 of the way up a sheet of nori. It helps of you wet your hands with some water to prevent the rice from sticking.

Simply lay your ingredients in the middle of the rice. Here are the cucumbers and carrots.

Next, the avocado and crab.

Real sushi chefs can roll these by hand without the aid of a rolling mat, but mine turn out best if I use a mat. The idea is to roll the sushi pulling it in tight to make a firm roll. The edge is sealed by wetting with a little bit of water.

Here is the roll all ready to be sliced.

You can slice them however thick you want them. I like a pretty good mouthful myself.

Along with the sushi I made an Asian-inspired soup. I started with a stock pot filled with kombu (seaweed), dried shitake mushrooms, garlic and ginger. This was simmered for about an hour until the mushrooms and seaweed were tender and the broth was flavored.

The broth was strained and flavored with some soy sauce, clam dashi powder, a splash of mirin and a dash of sesame oil.

The mushrooms and seaweed were sliced finely and placed back in the soup.

Served with soy sauce and wasabi, the sushi was really tasty. The soup was very satisfying with a full robust flavor yet lightness that went well with the delicate flavors of the sushi.