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Top ten from Japan -- the food list

by prudence on 22-Dec-2015
izakaya

What a unique and wonderful thing Japanese cuisine is... Here are a few of my favourite things:

1. Noodles... Soup with udon, ramen, soba, or "ekisoba" -- perfect for winter. If you want ramen without the soup, go for mazemen ramen, where you coat your noodles (topped off with maybe a slice of pork) in a spicy sauce and an egg.

okonomiyaki

2. Okonomiyaki. This is a stout savoury pancake. In the Hiroshima style, the pancake, eggs, cabbage, noodles, and other ingredients form layers. In the Osaka style, they're mixed together. At the awesome okonomiyaki joint we visited with a friend in Hiroshima, guests sit round the griddle/table (whose warmth gives the whole place a welcome toastiness on a chilly evening); they consume their starters (cabbage in a light soy sauce or maybe a few fried oysters) while their main dish is constructed and cooked; then they use their little choppers to hack off bits and transfer them to their plates (the rest staying nice and warm on the griddle); and finally they enjoy... This is wonderful comfort food.

3. Breakfasts. Hotels offer buffets, and plates divided into segments. You proceed to fill the compartments with pieces of fish, bits of Japanese omelette, pickles, flaky tofu, pumpkin, or dishes like beef and burdock or chicken liver in soy sauce. Add two bowls to your tray, one with rice, and one with miso soup, and you're set for the day. Or you can breakfast with the businesspeople. Find an eatery that vends meal tickets (preferably one with the labels in English), and order your favourite combo. I was determined to try that classic Japanese breakfast food known as natto. This consists of fermented soya beans, and it has a bit of a rep for being smelly (I honestly didn't notice this), and stringy (with little strands that keep escaping the clutches of your mouth and draping themselves over your chin). But mixed with soy sauce and mustard, stirred well (which process reduces the stringiness), and eaten alongside a bowl of rice, bonito flakes, and okra with a raw egg stirred through, it's a really good brekkie.

4. Curry. This is nostalgic for me, as I ate a lot of it while I worked for Japanese-owned International Pacific College. CoCo was a good place to sample it, as you can choose the amount of rice, spice levels, etc.

hedgehog

5. Izakaya food. Izakaya are places where you can have a drink and a variety of small dishes. They often have a drunken hedgehog outside... They're quite informal, and the ones we visited were attractively decked out in traditional style. In Hiroshima, we tried different kinds of sake, and with it little dishes of eel tempura, raw fish, stuffed eggplant in batter, and chicken pieces cooked up so tenderly you could practically eat the bones. On Miyajima, we tried the local russet beer, grilled sea eel with wasabi, and a "Miyajima pudding", which consisted of a custard surrounding a piece of sweet potato, with a blueberry coulis on the top.

menu bottles

miyajima

6. Rice. What I call "clumped rice" is a great stand-by. For a quick pre-conference breakfast or pre-journey tea, you can have rice balls you've picked up earlier in a convenience store. In cafes, they often come warm, in sets, containing fillings such as seaweed, salmon, or an umeboshi (a sour, salty, pickled plum).

7. Little cakes. These basically involve a paste with a wrapping. Red bean paste is a very popular filling, and delicate riceflour-based "skins" are a very popular wrapping. Round Kyoto, a kind of flattened out mochi is endemic, with a little disc of paste (in our case plum) hidden in a folded-over square of rice-flour wrapper. These are called yatsuhashi. Nice. Momiji manju, on the other hand -- which we received as a gift, and ate on the top of Miyajima's Mount Misen -- have a more substantial wrapping, somewhere between a cake and a pastry. And different again are warabi mochi. These are traditionally made from bracken starch (who knew bracken had starch?). But the process of extracting the starch is long and tedious, so mostly this sweet is today made from another kind of starch, such as arrowroot. It's jelly-like, and this time the wrapper is the merest negligee -- a coating of soya bean flour, for example, or a dusting of green tea. These may come with a little jug of brown sugar syrup on the side, or they may be tucked away in your parfait.

gt&cakes

8. Green tea... There's so much to say about green tea. The most impressive has to be the roasted green tea, or hojicha. This has an extraordinarily appetizing aroma. But properly whisked matcha is also delicious, especially when accompanied by a little cake (see above). In a fusion vein, we also sampled matcha parfait (usually with green tea ice-cream, jelly, and mochi), lots of green tea latte, a green tea float (which is especially good when imbibed on the very roof of Osaka), steamed green tea cakes (stuffed with red bean paste), and baked green tea buns (sprinkled with red beans, sweet potato, and what might have been linseed). Different again is chagayu, which is a Nara dish consisting of rice cooked in green tea, served with a soft-boiled egg and some pickles. And I also sampled a green tea alcohol. This was called syoyo juling on the menu, but I can't find any reference to it anywhere else.

highfloat

9. Oddities. Such as Komeda's shiro noir. This means white and black in Japanese and French, and is a kind of hot Danish pastry, topped with ice-cream, and drizzled with maple syrup. And I guess the fish-shaped, kaya-stuffed waffle we bought in Osaka must also count as an oddity...

fish

10. Beer. Kirin. Asahi. Sapporo. Yebisu. Miyajima's own. Suntory. Lots to try, and all of it palatable.

miyajimabeer