Japanese cuisine

Food has been one of the highlights for me of our month‘s exploration of Japan. We have devoured the well-known and dined on the unexpected. From sushi to pickled apricots and noodles to grasshoppers our taste buds and bellies have been having a field day.

We ate the majority of our meals in noodlerias. Little backstreet restaurants with white flags outside their door indicating business. There are three main types of noodles in Japan, served in a variety of ways:
Soba noodles - made from buckwheat flour. These are typically eaten cold dipped in soy sauce flavoured with wasabi (horseradish) and spring onions.
Udon noodles - thick, juicy, white, wheat noodles. Served cold with dipping sauce or hot in soup. Chanko, the soup of the sumo, is a wholesome bowl of regular udon noodle soup with an unusually (for Japan) large portion of vegetables.
Ramen noodles - Chinese noodles of the type you get in Supernoodles. Served in a big bowl of miso (fermented soy bean) or pork broth soup, usually with bean sprouts, mushrooms and slices of pork. There are, apparently, regional differences between these soups. For example, the Hokkaido speciality adds a knob of butter and a spoonful of sweetcorn, suddenly becoming buttercorn soup. Essentially the same dish and actually available up and down the country - we found some in Himeji.

Noodlerias often serve barginous ‘sets’ for a mere three to four quid. These usually consist of a noodle dish with accompanying rice platter - rice balls, or rice bowl with shredded beef, pork cutlet or thin omelette on top.

Noodles pop up in other regional favourites too, like Hiroshima’s okonomi-yaki. Here noodles, bean sprouts, shredded cabbage and bacon are piled on top of a pancake then flipped over and encased in a fried egg. They are cooked on and eaten off the griddle in front of you with lashings of salty brown sauce.

Sushi is perhaps the most famous Japanese dish of all. A sushi meal is double the price of noodles (but still half the price of back home) so was reserved more for a treat. In the sushi restaurants of the revolving belt ilk (like Yo Sushi!) you simply pick off the delicious raw fish dishes as they whizz passed you. Of course, the Tsukijii Fish Market sushi took fresh fish to a whole other level, but I’ve said enough about that already. However, there is one sort-of-sushi that we did regularly indulge in - onigiri - or rice balls. These rice triangles wrapped in seaweed contain meat, fish or seaweed in the centre and make for very good breakfasts and/or lunches.

The bento box is the commuters’ favourite. This box of delights usually contains a mixture of pickled/sugared/salted things, fish, fried meat in breadcrumbs and a generous portion of rice with a pickled apricot on top.

Snacks are very popular and before each long journey Japanese friends would load us up with a crazy assortment. All are extremely salty or sweet. Many are made of rice, others are sticky and lots taste of fish and/or seaweed. Outside temples the favoured snacks are sweet redbean paste in raw dough and green tea icecream.

The Japanese diet is surprisingly lacking in fruit and vegetables, spring onions excluded (they appear in most savoury dishes). Perhaps not that surprising when you look at the prices - for example, one pound for one nashi, our favourite juicy, jumbo pear. Although there are enticing vegetable patches in the suburbs and villages, little is on sale or in the restaurants and I can‘t believe that people are getting anywhere near their 5-A-Day. When fruit and veg do turn up it is in heavily mutilated pickled, sugared and salted forms, so that it is hard to recognise what you are eating. It would appear that instead of getting minerals and vitamins from food, the Japanese add them as supplements to drinks, sweets and snacks. However, we were lucky to eat our fill of fresh produce during our WWOOFing week in Hokkaido.

Most Japanese flavours are quite clean, albeit strongly sugary or salty. That is apart from bar food and kusikatu. Most pubs require you to eat small dishes with your drinks. You can choose from an eclectic mix including fried chicken cartilage, fried lotus roots, steamed soy beans and raw eggs to dip things in. Kusitaku is a disgusting mixture of fatty meat, fish, vegetables and cheese kebabs battered and deep fried. They’d go down well in Scotland.

Fresh is a key word in Japanese cuisine and many dishes - sushi, okonomi-yaki, kusikatu - are prepared right in front of you. Sukiyaki is particularly exciting as you cook this dish yourself. Or at least you light the fire on your table over which a prepared bowl of beef, vegetables, noodles and egg then boils away.

The highlight of our culinary tour was without a doubt our dinner in the ryokan (traditional Japanese inn). Here we were served a smorgasbord of tiny dishes including tempura (lightly battered and fried okra, vine leaf and noodle), shiitake mushrooms, cured ham, dried tofu, black bean rice, rainbow trout and grasshoppers. Yes, we ate grasshoppers, and they actually tasted good!

So as we prepare to leave the land of the rising sun we say goodbye to sushi, seaweed, rice, noodles and random fried things and hello to rice, noodles and random fried things. Chinese chow here we come!