_john

wow this is a great start. Some other things I remember from the dish I had were that is was not very sweet, the red chilies cardamom and cinnamon were whole, and it was fairly bitter. I like the bitterness so I usually do not salt or blanch the bitter gourd. I also think there may have been some slices of ginger included. The egg sounds like an interesting addition. what is jeera?

I have a craving for bitter melon curry. If you happen to live in the San Francisco Bay Area and have been to Naan 'N Curry and have tried their bitter melon curry, that is the type of thing I am looking for. I am looking for a good recipe. The only things I know are in the version I have had are bitter melon, curry leaves, black cardamom, cinnamon, tomato, and onion. Any other bitter melon fans?

I heard that warabi mochi is a kansai thing, is this true? warabi mochi is my favorite wagashi. I am lucky there are two wagashi vendors that have very good warabi mochi near my house, and the upscale supermarket sometimes has it for 100yen for 7 pieces. I like the kinako type the best. I think I will try to make warabi mochi if I see warabiko anywhere. I dont eat warabi mochi or bracken often because it has been shown to cause stomach cancer (source: English, Japanese):

Well I just found out that I have to leave Japan for what could be up to a month (visa run departing 25th april). I decided to make Seoul my destination because I am very interested in Korean food and it is relatively cheap to get there from Japan. This thread has already given me a lot of ideas about what to try and where to look around but I have a few other questions. I would like a small primer on how to ask where things are, order in restaurants, and any other customs or phrases that will make it easier for me to get along in Seoul. I find myself using these phrases all the time in Japanese: excuse me, thank you, where is X?, where can I find delicious X? what is this called?, and how much is this? How much do I need to know to get around comfortably and let people feel somewhat at ease about me poking my nose in their restaurants and stalls? I can read Hangeul very slowly, so this should help. I am staying in a mix of guest houses, jjimjilbang, and in people’s apartments that I met on couchsurfing.com so I will most likely meet people that have a better idea of where to eat than I do. General recommendations for a young, poor, respectful, curious, and very hungry traveler?

After a little linguistic hunt and peck I have come up with this: bitter cucumber in Korean is 쓴오이 ssoon oi. this receives 97,000 results on google where you can see pictures of goya. further research leads me to believe this is not the only way to say it in Korean, but someone might know what you are saying if you said this. Maybe I will bring some to the okinawan restaurant near my apartment when it is finished. My area has a very large concentration of Koreans so it would be the perfect fusion!

I just discovered an Okinawan restaurant two blocks from my house! I love goya, as you can see here, and I tried their goya camploo. It was really good, although I think they skimped on the goya, next time I will tell them that I love goya. I saw a few long simmered pork dishes that looked really good, I will definitely be going back, and taking my camera. What dishes should I try?

I am proud to present my ゴーヤーキムチ　goya kimchi! This kimchi of bitter melon, also known as bitter gourd, and a lot of other names, including the Japanese name Goya, was prepared in the same way as every other kimchi except for the fact that I blanched the goya after salting. I love bitter melon, so I thought why not make kimchi of it? I prepared it tonight so it hasn't fermented yet, but when I get back from Korea in two weeks it should be just right. Does anyone know the name for bitter melon in Korean? I couldn't seem to figure it out.

I think my pickle bed is still too salty then. Any more than 6 hours produces a pickle that is too salty. There doesn’t seem to be any white patches and it is quite floppy. I saw a bag of pre moistened nuka at the vegetable market. The bag is resealable and is designed to be used as the pickling vessel. I might just pick up a bag of that, but I liked nurturing my own nuka and adjusting the flavor to my tastes. I think I will just sacrifice more cheap vegetables to my salty nuka in order to level things out unless I can find some unsalted nuka.

I think will try making it as well, my kimchi reserves are running low. I will probably use korean green peppers from my nearby Korea town. Actually I think I have seen one vendor who sells the pickles already made.

That was my thought exactly! Now you can focus on other obscure cultural questions and product searches .

The nuka that first bought was had a picture of a refrigerator on it, and a housewife putting the nuka in the fridge. I didn't really think about this until I got home and was mixing it up, it was way saltier than any other nuka I had ever used. I'm guess this is a type meant to be used in the refigerator? I bought a second pack that was much less salty, and mixed it with some of the other stuff. Now it takes about 6 hours to turn a cucumber into a pickle that I consider tasty and not overly salty. After a little tweaking with mustard my pickle bed seems to be stable and happy living under the counter.

Today I ate an interesting gimmick food item. It was Glico LEE 30x spicy beef curry. It belongs to the category of strange Japanese foods known as 激辛 gekikara which means "extremely spicy". On the box it claims that if you add the included sauce it becomes 40x spicy. It was just about the perfect level of spicyness for me. I liked the sauce packet more than the curry itself though. The sauce was some sort of rayu (chili oil) that was made with what tasted like spicy paprika. The sauce packet was really good. I don't think I will buy it again, but I might try to make a similar rayu with paprika.

I would just like to give a few hints for fellow translators: The most important online resource for me is Jim Breen's WWWJDIC which is an online dictionary with many functions. It allows you to look up kanji using a multiradical method which is great if you don't know the reading, and it has all the other functions of a basic dictionary. Recently an extremely helpful piece of software has come out. If you are using the Firefox browser (which you should probably be using anyway. It's free) you can download an extension for your browser called Rikaichan (also free). Rikaichan allows you to place your cursor over any Japanese text, including kanji, hiragana, and katakana and a small popup will appear with the reading of that text in hiragana as well as the meaning of the kanji (see image below). You need to download the Rikaichan plugin as well as the J->E dictionary. With these two tools you can figure out almost any Japanese material that can be accessed on the web. Some knowledge of Japanese grammer, and being able to read at least hiragana, will really help you when using both these tools. When you are trying to find out the most common way of saying something in Japanese you can use google to see how popular that usage is. Just enter the variations of the word in Japanese into google and take note of how many results you get. Good luck to everyone who is studying Japanese food and language!

They are shredded dried squid, that is then topped with (white?) chocolate that is flavored with curry or red pepper. It sounds like a good drinking snack. here is a machine translation of the "Hall of Strange Food". It is almost as funny as the original Japanese! I am really interested in the kimchi milkshake. I read that Lotteria (a Japanese fast food chain) was pressured to release the kimchi milkshake after users of a popular Japanese message board, called 2ch, started flooding Loterria's website with requests for the item. It was a joke, but they actually released the kimchi milkshake at a few locations for a limited time!

I was happy to see this post, I have been wok shopping before... 3 times! I have owned two wok burners and 3 "good" woks. firstly on woks: I have had many woks before, some good, some bad. I recommend the one with an all metal handle, this is the type I have in Japan and I love it. Get a big one, a really big one, this will allow you to use the "thermal inertia" of all the metal to heat the food without losing a lot of heat. The first thing you should do with this type of wok is remove the coating. It is a strange almost plastic coating that will flake off with use, I personally take a piece of steel wool, or very fine sand paper and remove all trace of the coating. Then take a finer grit sand paper and bring the surface to a good shine. on seasoning: I like to use animal fat, usually bacon or shmaltz. Side note, all my wok burners have been outside, this style of seasoning requires a lot of ventilation. I heat the wok up on the burner to burn off any remaining machine oil or other items on the surface. You will need your oil, a roll of paper towels, and a pair of tongs if you don't have fingers of asbestos. When the wok is scorching hot fold the paper towel into a small rectangle and dip it in the fat. Use your hand or the tongs to move the paper towel all over the surface of the wok, you want the coating to be very, very, thin. If you see any pooling or beading, there is too much oil and you should remove it as fast as possible with another paper towel. This layer will then "burn on", darken, and harden. I usually repeat this process 10-20 times, making sure that that all areas are heated equally and darken equally. I use this same technique after cooking in the wok every time for about 3 months before I am satisfied with the seasoning. This may seem extreme but I enjoy making the wok my own. on burners: The burner that I really liked out of the two I have owned allowed you to adjust the flame level for each ring, it had 3 rings (it was very similar to the one you subtitled "It has 6 rings!"). There was also a valve to adjust the air/propane mixture, this allowed you to supercharge the fire a little and tweak it just the way you liked. There was an integrated lighter, and the knob allowed you to adjust all the rings depending on which way you turned it. I don't have a burner here, my balcony isn't really big enough for one and my kitchen lacks the ventilation. But maybe one day I will have the same firepower I had in the states. Good luck!

I am one of those natto lovers mentioned above. My theory is that people either love natto or hate it. The reason they hate it is usually "the smell" or "the texture". No one has said they hate the taste of natto. The people who love it, like me, enjoy the taste, smell, and texture. I have actually mixed coffee and natto before, and I liked the results. I mixed espresso and natto with raw egg yolk and put it over rice, I ate it with thick sliced slab bacon, in college I ate this for breakfast about once a week! My motto is "I will try anything twice... no actually three times". I like most stinky foods, but I didn't like tellagio on my third try.

I have been fascinated by strange foods in Japan. A few have been mentioned in other threads but I thought I would make a thread to collect them all. A Japanese online dictionary describes kishoku as (rough translation): "strange food combinations and condiments used on food that up until now have never been used in such a way. Such as covering things in chocolate " Here is the most popular site on google for 奇食: 奇食の館 (Hall of Strange Food) which has been linked to on egullet before. I would also like to talk about gimmicks used in Japanese restaurant and food products. A good example is "extremely spicy hell ramen". A more general example would be "mens" pocky. What strange and gimmick foods have you come across?

I am amazed at the ability of people to slurp up very hot noodles. I can't do it, I have to blow on the noodles and even then I burn my tongue. I have never seen beef ramen, but many shops have similar "gimmicks" to sell ramen. That is my favorite thing about ramen, the variety and creativity of ramen shops. The problem I had with the noodles was that they would being to stick after I cut them, even though I used quite a bit of extra flour. The texture was also not as firm as I am used to, and I didn’t have kansui. I also had the same problem with my noodles being not yellow enough. Hiroyuki: You should really see tampopo, It is one of my favorite movies. I studied film production at college, while working as a chef, and studying Japanese so you can understand why I was very interested in it.

That's a shame, I just found them and they might be going out of business. I live in Osaka and I haven’t researched to find a shop with a good beer selection yet. Coming from the California I am totally spoiled by Beverages and More. Maybe they will open up in Japan just like Costco has.

My first thought on reading this thread is maybe you should try using agar agar (also known as kanten) to make your jelly. from this site: Because it does not melt as easily as animal gelatin I think you should try dipping umeshu jelly in dark chocolate. I think making something similar to the american dark chocolate covered orange jelly candies would be very tasty. Or you could simply dab a bit of gold foil on the umeshu jelly and serve it as it.

I discovered an extremely good Japanese beer about a week ago. It is an unfiltered wheat beer called Gingakogen komugi beer (銀河高原小麦ビール). I found it at YaMaYa import food shop and I have not seen it elsewhere. Very nice flavor, I really enjoy unfiltered beers, the flavor of the yeast is very pronounced. I would like to try more craft beers from Japan, that koshihikari beer sounds interesting. Nick can you tell me a little bit about the beer festival in Tokyo?

Wow alvis, that looks really great. I might just order that cookbook. I would be interested to see their recipes. Now that I live in Japan I have less need to make ramen at home but once I get a pressure cooker I would like to try making it again. My local supermarket has pork back bones for very cheap, I could fill a whole pot for 500yen. Can you tell us more about the noodles? I have had problems making them before and yours look very authentic. Also, did you blanch the bones? And did you use a rapid boil or a very long slow cooking?

If the nukazuke pickle bed gets too sour does this stop the fermentation? Is there ever a point when a pickle bed cannot be brought back from the dead and you need to start over? What exactly does the stirring do, does it introduce oxygen? inquiring pickle minds want to know.

I have used korean yuzucha, soju, and sparkling water to make a nice drink before. I don't know how it would work withg white wine though, make a small test cup and try various combos before you make a large amount of it is my only advice. I just picked up some suntory "ice gin" and made some wafuu gin and tonics with yuzu in the place of lime. Both the gin and the combination turned out to be really good, I will making these again for sure.

I think the flipping something that is deep frying with your hand is a little tricky. if your hand was moist, not wet, and you flipped it quickly the moisture on your hand might turn to steam and create a layer of steam that would protect you. This is the same principal which lets you walk on hot coals, and hot molten lead in your mouth. Needless to say I am not going to try it. I flip things that are not deep frying with my hands all the time, when I was working full time as a chef the tip of my thumb and index finger on my right hand actually lost some feeling ("hands of asbestos") from doing this so often with hot food. I think sesame oil for frying in Japan is often a blend of refined sesame oil and soybean/canola oil. Someone correct me if I'm wrong on this. I use regular salad oil with a generous amount of sesame oil blended in, the taste seems just about the same as what you would get at a tonkatsu restaurant.