JasonTrue

I've found that cakes with more butter are fine with less sugar Sugar seems to be the dirty secret of the "low fat" snack food industry, so I'm sure there's a balance that can be struck. I also think that if you look outside of the sphere of American cake recipes, sugar is used more sparingly. You could almost say that Japanese adopted the American "chiffon cake" as their own, and some Japanese recipes I've seen used little more than an ounce of sugar for a whole cake that would likely have four times as much sugar in the typical American incarnation. German and Austrian Torten also tend to use less sugar, sometimes taking advantage of the fat and flavor in ground nuts.

I believe much of Japan's supply of uni is from California (northern, if my fuzzy memory serves me correctly), though thanks to the export market and the limited US demand it doesn't necessarily get widely sold in the US. On the other hand, my neck of the woods (Washington state) is an important source of Mirugai (geoduck), which probably matters more to wealthy Hong Kong foodies than to Japanese, but has some presence in Japan as well.

Japanese Country Cooking, by Gaku Homma, is one of the first Japanese cookbooks I bought and still one I reference regularly. It's more useful as a guide to the origins and uses of various ingredients than as a recipe book, and the first edition I have contains several translation and transliteration errors, but it's a far deeper reference than any ordinary cookbook. It's also full of culinary folklore, some inaccurate (many of my mistakes corrected by others on this board are thanks to this book), but on the other hand, folklore is also valuable for making sense of the mindset that goes into making Japanese cuisine. Gaku's book also became more valuable to me after I had more taste experiences in Japan, as I was able to make more sense of "season to taste" guidance, and get a better sense of proportionality and balance.

Vios is also very child-friendly, as noted in the thread covering it elsewhere... It's a very nice Greek place with a cafe-style atmosphere and a small play area.

It seems to be working for things like Napoli-certified pizza. In Seattle a local restaurateur opened the first certified Napoli-style pizza restaurant, which is good, though it has prevented certain innovations (e.g. good local tomatoes in the late summer in favor of San Marzano canned). The nationality of the chef should be irrelevant, and it's certainly true in cuisines with a longer history in the US such as French. However, thanks to the perceived cachet of Japanese cuisine, some disasters have been committed in pursuit of the buck: Korean immigrants run a fairly large number of terrible restaurants under the facade of "Japanese" food. It doesn't mean it's impossible for Koreans or Americans to produce good Japanese food in the US, but based on the current market it's a fairly good bet that non-Japanese managed restaurants will not produce great Japanese food. I don't necessarily assume the worst of non-Japanese management, though it tends to leave me doubtful. I rely on other cues, usually related to things like the menu (a tendency to offer simple dishes without lots of clever tricks), presentation (I wanted to run away from a San Francisco restaurant solely based on the window display, but was unfortunately overruled by my hungry and weary Hong Kong colleagues, and my suspicions proved correct), and sometimes the name. When a name strikes me as strange in Japanese, though I cannot explain in a way that makes the information useful to anyone who doesn't speak at least a little Japanese, it's often a good sign that the place is a disaster. Japanese chefs are also no guarantee of quality. The U.S. market mostly doesn't financially reward really high quality in Japanese food nearly as much as Japan does; truly great Japanese chefs will make more money by staying in Japan. In contrast, great French chefs can now do better running a small restaurant in, say, New York or Boston, than they can in France, in at least some cases, so the incentive to travel is stronger. My own Japanese food is better than some of the Japanese-run restaurants I've been to in the U.S., and I'm not the only one who would say so

You might also try using niboshi, small dried sardine-like fish, which is typical in west Japan. While Gaku Homma describes a dried konbu/dried shiitake base for dashi as a vegetarian stock, which he prefers for some dishes over the katsuo type, my girlfriend prefers it when I use dried porcini instead of shiitake. While certainly not indigenous, it does a better job of simulating the aroma and complexity of katsuo than shiitake does. Originally I tried this on a whim, and I was surprised at how similar it is to katsuo-dashi.

I might be missing something, but isn't this mostly a question of finding appropriate ingredients? I've not yet found a recipe that needed modification solely because I used organic ingredients.

Pizza is pie... But not all pie is pizza. Or something like that.

The instructions only indicate about 10 minutes of soaking for your ddeok bok gi is required, and then additional water is added to dish while cooking. The instructions are otherwise similar to what Sheena Greena suggests.

It occurred to me that a thinner version of koyadoufu was served to me in China when I went to dinner at a sort of fire pot restaurant. It was just rehydrated before being brought to the table, and we cooked it in the soup for a bit before eating.

I've made daigaku imo fairly often (see: http://blog.jagaimo.com/archive/2005/09/27/2020.aspx and http://blog.jagaimo.com/archive/2006/11/05/2802.aspx ) I'm not sure you'll get the same results by "oven-frying" (I imagine you mean roasting satsumaimo coated with a thin layer of oil) because the satsumaimo will probably want to aborb the syrup instead of being coated by it, and the potatoes probably won't get so crispy. But it might work. It seems like it would take a lot longer to prepare, though. Anyway, the basic idea on the syrup coating is to boil soy sauce, sugar, mirin, until it's foamy (you can decide whether to cook it to a hard crack stage or less), and coat the fried chunks of satsumaimo with that.

I like the jidori no tamago at the Seattle location of Uwajimaya... I'm not really sure whether those eggs have any English labeling, but they're about as rich of a yolk as I've ever seen, including in Japan, where deep orange yolks are much more ordinary than in North America. The label should read something like: 地鶏のたまご . They're pretty expensive (about $4.70/dozen) but they make the best poached eggs.

They're running about $1/lb in Seattle this year... it's been a bit of a surprise. Though these are local ones. Imported ones, or ones from California or similar, tend to be more expensive... and this year the local ones aren't netted.

The first item is Korean-style mochi (glutinous rice cake) called ddeok bok gi (my transliteration might be off); they're usually cooked with Korean-style salty red pepper flakes and other ingredients such as kimchi, "odeng" (a kind of fish cake a little similar to satsuma-age), even pork. It's sort of braised. You might also be able to incorporate the Korean style mochi into a soup, which is similar to a Japanese dish called ozouni, but I forgot the Korean word (maybe it's just ddeok guk). Usually that soup is using a crosswise-sliced version of the ddeok. The second item is koya-doufu, freeze-dried tofu. To use, soak in hot water for a few minutes to rehydrate. My girlfriendonce substituted koya-doufu in place of fish cakes called hanpen when making a kind of sweet omelet called datemaki tamago for new year (see http://blog.jagaimo.com/archive/2006/01/02/2124.aspx). Sometimes it's just used in a simmered vegetable dish like nimono (see http://www.flickr.com/photos/mac_vegetarian/262966108/ ) made with Japanese soup stock, salt, mirin, and soy sauce. You could add things like carrots, small taro potatoes (satoimo), etc. brought to a slow simmer, and season gently to taste.

Actually in Japan... When I was at Philipps University in Marburg, German as an exchange student, I was taking a course given by a visiting professor, a Nikkei historian from Temple University, mostly focusing on the changes in work, family and lifestyle in the postwar era. My memories on the details might be a bit fuzzy, but I tend to remember things that I've learned related to food, correct or otherwise Are you talking about in Japan proper, or here in the States? ←

I don't think using local ingredients is a problem... I was kind of hinting at that with my tomato commentary. It does seem clear that the motivation of this effort is to increase Japanese food exports, however, which might mean that such substitutions could be considered "inauthentic" even if the results are bad for the food. I've made the sweet potato substitution when I couldn't find decent (also not imported) satsuma-imo. Often using the locally available thing is the right thing to do; witness how French cuisine works when it travels. In the last 60 years or so Japanese cuisine has changed quite a bit. A professor of mine compared the vegetable selection of a rural shop in the 1960s with the selection in the 1990s, and it was a complete transformation; one was lucky to find much more than eggplant, negi, onion, daikon, kabocha and satsumaimo in some areas during the 60s, and in the 90s even the very rural areas have a dizzying array of choices.

hehe... great minds think alike.

Another idea would be a caramel cage... drizzle hard-crack caramel over a round shape (balloon or round silicone mold or a greased bowl), in a lattice formation... make a caramel ice cream with a fairly dark caramel base, and place overturned caramel cages over the ice cream. It's a little deconstructed, but it requires nothing more than average sugar work.

For vegetable seeds, Kitazawa Seed company might be a place to start in the US. You may find some of their products in Asian supermarkets (they have a display in Uwajamaya Seattle). For mushrooms, I can't help, but it looks like Hiroyuki pointed you in the right direction. You might ask a mushroom grower like Grandview Mushrooms (Grandview, WA) (I never asked him if he provides a substrate for mushrooms but he has really good shiitake).

For me, the first clue that something is amiss is a Japanese girl's name (Yasuko's or similar) as the restaurant name, or anything + Teriyaki... I just don't go in such places.

Sounds nice, but will be tricky to implement. Japanese cuisine is a moving target, and the defining features of the cuisine are conventions rather than rules. Historically, cooking oil was expensive and fuel was more plentiful than, say, in China, so boiling became more important than sauteeing/stir-frying. (In China the quick cooking technique conserved fuel). As an example of the difficulty in defining what is traditional: I'm completely bewildered by broccoli in tempura but I don't think it's so strange to make it as ohitashi. Broccoli is decidedly not a traditional ingredient, but it's possible to treat it with a traditional technique. Similarly, tomatoes are common in contemporary Japanese culinary culture, but there are no particularly traditional dishes depending on them... I wouldn't de-certify a Japanese restaurant for serving a little salad, because I've been served little salads in otherwise normal Japanese restaurants. In sushi, the U.S. versions have proportionality out of whack, even when they sometimes use quality ingredients and techniques, just because the restaurant owners think their customers want "bigger" portions. Of course, the biggest flaw is some combinations that are truly bizarre, but also there are some actual innovations in Japan as well. It's more an approach to ingredients that differs, than a set of rules, so it will be hard to codify. And some of the results of certification processes are not always desirable: the Napoli pizza certification requires San Marzano tomatoes, so the certified restaurants in the US used canned San Marzano tomatoes even when seasonal better-quality local, fresh tomatoes are available.

Actually I believe you'd have to bring a cutting (which is tricky due to customs restrictions) because apple seeds produce very different offspring from the seed than their parents. All of the marketable apple varieties are actually clones.

Nashi no Hiya-yakko... Grated Japanese pears with grated fresh ginger, a little scallion, and a splash of Japanese soy sauce. Hiromi thought it was an odd idea when I suggested it, but she was a quick convert after tasting the results. We had way too many Japanese pears after picking a bunch of them at a friend's orchard near Everett, so this was one idea for making use of them. More details: Blog entry on nashi no hiyayakko

I think corn tortillas have a shorter shelf life than flour. The process is also a bit more complex than flour tortillas due to the cal treatment of the corn, so until a larger demand emerges it's not likely to be worth the effort for Japanese companies to produce. There aren't enough Mexican restaurants for companies to make money producing fresh masa or tortillas. It's also certainly not worth the airfreight cost and distribution hassles to import from somewhere else, either. I don't think I've even seen a tortilla at the "Mexico" section of FoodEx, unless they were promoting avocados or something. I believe Youki or a similar firm distributes American brands of hard taco shells in Japan, because they can be kept for months, but I think they are sold for about 700 yen for 6. I don't think it's a matter of taste, so much... heck, packaged corn tortillas are usually pretty miserable no matter where you are. But there is potential for the market to grow if Mexican food ever becomes trendy in Japan. Hiromi's parents were so fascinated by corn tortillas after we ate at a cheap Seattle Mexican restaurant that they bought a package of corn tortillas at a supermarket to take home and eat with yaki-niku and lettuce. I've been to a few "Mexican" restaurants in Japan, and they make the average gloppy-yellow-cheese US bargain restaurants look gourmet. One served tabasco and canned tomatoes, sans garlic, lime or cilantro, as a "salsa", with tortilla chips made from flour tortillas. On the other hand, if you're willing to spend money, you can eat reasonably decent middle-class restaurant fare at a spot in Nishi-Azabu, which probably makes the corn tortillas themselves.

Yep. That's the magic of the combination of katakuriko and tofu. It doesn't work with many other ingredients.