JasonTrue

It might seem counter-intuitive, but I'd recommend keeping it simpler. The mirin and lemon juice might be distracting... if you're using real mirin, it's a pretty strong, complex flavor including the alcohol; if you're using "hon-teri" or "mirin-fuu" mirin which is most dominantly sugar or corn syrup, might double your sugar and obscure the sharpness of the shiso. I recommend using some pine nuts though. One Seattle pesto-obsessed cook likes to blanch his basil leaves briefly and ice them to make the leaves more dramatically green. I've done this technique once or twice and it definitely makes for a prettier , more durable pesto, without much damage to flavor caused by the heat (I only dunk the leaves in boiling water for a few seconds). Another question is what did you use it with. I have used Korean shiso (gaennip) for a pesto and the only difference between the standard basil/garlic/pine nut/olive oil puree was that I used shiso. (I always wait to add the parmesan until I'm ready to incorporate it in the dish). I think it was very obvious that I was using shiso, but I was doing something very simple; it was just a base for a pizza with mozzarella and one or two vegetables. If the dish you used it in was more complex than being combined with a starch (pasta or pizza or rice or something) or mild-tasting protein (mozzarella, cream, chicken, fish), you might have too much flavor competition going on. If the pesto gets cooked it might also hide the brighter flavor notes of shiso. Eric Gower's book has a recipe for a shiso pesto kind of thing (shiso, ginger, zest of orange, juice of orange citrus, juice, olive oil, vinegar, a little salt and pepper. He was using it as a topping for oborodoufu-based hiyayakko. When thinking about Italian or Japanese cooking, usually the secret to getting great flavors is keeping it simple and fresh. The more you add the less "sappari" the food will usually be. When I am cooking some European, Chinese or Thai foods, if I'm not happy with the results I tend to wonder what's missing. But for Japanese, Korean, or Italian foods I usually need to remind myself that I should step back and see if I've obscured something rather than awakened the basic flavors.

Aha! Mystery solved

All tea is from the same plant, unless it's "herbal", in which case it isn't really tea. (not a value judgment). In a former life I was asked to add some crustacea to a newspaper ad for a restaurant. They were promoting a lobster event and the only thing close I could come up with in our clip art library was a shrimp. I was no illustrator, so a hand-drawn one during a busy newspaper production schedule was out of the question. Though I think if you pay a designer more than $9/hour they should be able to do some research and come up with something better... you never know.

That's quite surprising... I would expect it to be cheaper in New York where there would be many different suppliers. I think I usually pay $1.20-1.60 for a 10-pack of Japanese-style aojiso, sometimes a bit more for akajiso. Korean gaennip is a little bit cheaper (at Korean markets anyway). I guess they may be just doing their part to pump up the leaf so that people will think it's an exclusive thing. I think it does add something that mint and basil don't, but I find it quite refreshing to swap them; insalata caprese with shiso, for example. (I learned this from a Japanese friend who made harumaki with mozzarella, shiso and tomato... I still steal this idea). interesting article! and wow: For what shiso costs, it should add something that mint and basil don't. Jody Denton, chef of Azie in San Francisco, estimates that he pays up to 25 cents a leaf. Rocco Dispirito at Union Pacific in New York pays even more: $3.80 for a pack of 10 leaves. and I thought it could be expensive in Japan sometimes... ←

And a photo of a matcha "martini"... It's a standard martini recipe made with the matcha gin recipe I described above. I used raw pine nuts instead of the usual stuffed olive, since I can't imagine the combination of matcha, olive and gin. Alas, I don't have a martini glass, but I do have a Mashiko wine cup in my personal collection. Its "seiji-yuu" (celadon glaze) like appearance disappeared a bit perhaps due to too much light on the cup. My friend requested it "up" on the rocks. If, instead of infusing the gin for a few days, you simply shake the matcha and gin together, you should get a dramatically emerald-colored gin, but you'll lose some of the complexity created by drawing out the alcohol-soluble flavors into the infusion.

Aha, well I guess I could have taken that route. I rely too much on Jim Breen's web dictionary... it provides a lot of alternative translations without any clarification of usage or context or nuance, or, apparently, scientific names of animals. I think I saw the same information on one other source so I stayed confused. Dictionaries also notoriously poorly translate food, animal and plants. I had this same problem when I was studying German.

Tencha is almost the same as gyokuro-cha, except I believe the gyokuro leaves are folded in some shape. As far as I recall, it's unfermented Japanese green tea which is steamed. It's still camellia sinesis. However, the picture of the leaf on the bottle looks like a momiji as compared to Camellia sinesis, the tea leaf. So I am still confused about what Tencha is. Here is a pic I found. It kind of looks like the berry family (raspberries, blackberries, etc). Here is some Tencha tea. Since this plant is not the Camellia tea plant, now I am confused.... can anyone tell me more about Tencha, and more about when other plants besides Camellia are used in what I thought were purely Camellia teas (Matcha). ←

I see them at the Hoteres trade show every year at Tokyo Big Site in March. The one you're looking at seems like one of the more modest-capacity ones. Some of them pop out nigiri-zushi onto large trays. The main differentation between these types of machines after speed is how closely the texture replicates the "real thing". These are usually meant for making nigiri-zushi for kaiten-zushi restaurants or for institutional food service. There are some for maki-zushi and for o-musubi (onigiri) as well. I've also seen machines suitable for gyouza production, shumai, and so on. Some are designed for busy restaurant applications, and some are designed for more industrial uses. I've seen some machines for sauteeing also... they either "jump" the food with a simulated wrist action or they have a corkscrew-like insert and automatic pan movement. You can also find machines that automatically wet, warm and wrap cloth oshibori. The coolest machine I saw at Hoteres wasn't an automated machine... It was a fryer that had some internal flow mechanism that makes sure water doesn't return to the surface, so the old throw an ice cube in the fryer trick doesn't work anymore... no dangerous steam explosions. It was called a "clean fryer." I always wanted to import that, though I can't say I have any restaurant customers for such a thing.

There are several cold dishes that might be nice also: braised tiny bamboo shoots with chilies and garlic might be very nice if you can get frozen or fresh young sprouts. It's about the right time of year for fresh ones, I think. Thin strips of lightly salt-seasoned simmered kelp, with some garlic in heated oil (not burned) and drizzled on the kelp, then marinated overnight, is also very nice. In Beijing I've had all sorts of cold dishes, mostly simple, sometimes not. Some wonderful, some not... In Taipei some restaurant I went to served blanched asparagus with squeeze bottle mayonnaise... I think I had a cold dish of marinated wheat gluten from a Shanghai-style restaurant in Hong Kong, which was a little sweet for my taste but my Shanghai friend seemed to like it. In the US it seems that cold Chinese dishes are often neglected. I don't know if this is because of US taste preferences or if it's some other reason. I find some of these dishes quite refreshing. When I entertained Hong Kong business visitors, I usually tried to take them to restaurants where they could try many small dishes of good quality rather than risk ordering huge portions of potentially mediocre food. I went to an excellent Mexican restaurant in Ballard (Seattle) that does small plates of Oaxacan food, a good Northwesty place called Lark, and in the Bay Area, a Little Italy place. At the one home-cooked dinner I did for them back in December, I played my strengths and went with seasonal foods that are just staples in my repertoire, one or two of which would have been at home on a Chinese table. I would recommend doing this. I made a pizza with sage pesto, chanterelles, and thin slices of eggplant, a mixed green salad with yuzu vinaigrette, a little squash-potato soup, some grilled mushrooms with basil and garlic, and some green beans with lion’s mane mushrooms and ginger. We finished off the pear sorbet that I had also made previously. I served a quince liqueur and a lychee liqueur I had made. These were roundly successful: everyone in the group had at least two favorites, and nobody left hungry. For the next week or so that we were traveling together, they would ask me to find a restaurant serving something like one of the dishes that I had made. Don't serve huge portions of one type of food that might not match your guests' tastes, but don't try to completely overreach your usual culinary range. Make a few small things that are simple and pleasant, one or two things that are a challenge for you and maybe a reference to your guests' food culture, and nothing that will hold you up in the kitchen (I often neglect this last point myself), and have something to nibble on while your guests are waiting for you to finish up in the kitchen. For years I've been entertaining with dishes that are made with a consciousness of my non-American friends' taste preferences. But this doesn't necessarily mean making dishes that are exactly like home; it means knowing things like Japanese tend to like simple refreshing flavors, Chinese usually crave variety and like a balance of heavy, strong, and light dishes, etc. My Japanese guests usually like hearing about the ingredients or where the ingredients come from (it makes the food taste better); my Chinese guests tend to appreciate this, but they tend to eat with their mouths first. Unless you've spent some time in Asia trying to pull off a completely Chinese dinner might be a risky endeavor. In my early days cooking Asian food I occasionally nailed something, but often enough got polite smiles for things that didn't seem quite right. (I still mess something up often enough, but usually I can tell, and usually I'm more critical than my guests). I think it's an excellent idea to recognize your guests' culinary frame of reference, but it would be a shame not to show off what you're already best at cooking. My local Chinese friends cook fairly simply when entertaining, with some dishes that can be made ahead, and just invest in one or two special dishes. (Then again, the occasions are more casual). Edited typo

I'm not sure it's the same fruit... I had fresh "haw fruit" (or so I thought it was called) in China and it had a shape and size similar to a lychee, with a very red color and a distinctly sour taste. I ate a lot of them at the hotel buffet where I usually stayed.

I promised a report on Matcha Gin Results... I was quite happy with the outcome. The ratio of the "matcha latte mix" and the gin was just about right; the sugar content of the matcha latte blend allows for a relatively dry overall flavor. It is as I expected: It can be consumed straight or enhanced with a bit of vermouth. I did change my original plan and actually moved the bottle to the freezer after a mere 5 days, because I was noticing a slight color change. I should also note that I gave the blend a daily shaking, since some of the matcha settles out of solution and I wanted to make sure the flavor fully infused. It would be a good idea to take a photo of a green tea martini, but I am still struggling to think of the proper garnish. This is a very thick green concoction and the garnish won't really be visible unless it floats. Olives and onions wouldn't match, but I thought of a few options: shavings of white chocolate; maybe a Korean style garnish of raw pine nuts, like you find on soo jeong gwa or shikhae; some kind of amanattou (would it float? a floating candied azuki bean or candied white bean?); or perhaps a cocktail spear pressed into a slice of youkan. I think the white chocolate or pine nuts would be prettiest, though the flavor profile of amanattou or youkan would probably feel more natural. I love the white chocolate/matcha or pine nut/matcha combination, though, as I've pointed out in another post.

I would suggest looking carefully at how aggressively your water was boiling. If it was a furious boil, it might be causing the pasta to bounce around and collide too much. Or they may have simply been overcooked... Were the instructions provided in Japanese? They might have advised a longer cooking time to suit Japanese tastes. I think you should take them out just as they start to deform, before they are actually soft, since they need to have enough structure to survive the trauma of the stuffing.

I hadn't realized croquettes and omu-raisu had joined their menu... when it started I think it was mostly doria and wafuu spaghetti. I guess it's worth another look when I feel like I can stand the smoke. I am a bit of Japanese-style croquette fan... I didn't expect to be, because in my exchange student days, "Kroketten und Gemuese" was the buergerliche German restaurant equivalent of the token vegetarian "steamed veggie plate", and usually only a short step above canned peas and frozen tater tots. The Japanese version, on the other hand, I took to immediately. On the other hand, I can pull off an omu-raisu and a decent range of croquettes on my own. Also I haven't been much of a Japanese curry fan, and don't eat meat, so I guess the appeal is still a little limited for me. (Takana croquettes and tofu salad with yuzu-honey vinaigrette).

I think almost all kinds of candy in Korean are something-something-yeott. There are also things ending in jeom and things ending in gwa (yakgwa, etc.). But the ones described are probably a kind of yeott. My Korean culinary vocabulary is, alas, still pretty limited, so I'm not sure I can remember the name of the type you're referring to, but I am sure these are basically coated with a sugar confection made from maltose or corn syrup and honey or sugar. I know this is going to be a bad guess but is it Yut? I'm not sure how its made but I remember that there are a lot of different versions. My favorite one is more sticky soft brown color version made with ginger. I have had it in over 35 years. I have recently notice yut being sold at the local K G-store. Soup ←

I would recommend using about a two-three teaspoons of cooking matcha powder for a typical 2-3" 24-piece batch of cookies. You could do this with tea ceremony matcha, as I have sometimes done, but it will be unnecessarily extravagant. Matcha comes in different grades; some is meant for drinking in tea ceremony, some is well suited for cooking. The cheaper grades are actually better suited for baking because you lose much of the nuance in baking and you won't be spending as much money. Tea ceremony matcha can be $7-35 for 30-60 grams; cooking matcha should generally be much more reasonably priced. I have used sencha powder for cookies as well. I like it because it has a more complex taste than matcha, which tends to be bitter. But matcha's color is more dramatically green and the bitterness helps cut the sweetness of most American dessert recipes. My favorite green tea cookie recipe is a simple butter-based drop cookie with pine nuts, and optionally, chunks of white chocolate. You can try your favorite cookie recipe but use matcha instead of other flavorings. I'll try to post a more precise recipe by Monday or so... I'm afraid I usually improvise and have never troubled myself to write down something useful enough for someone else to follow. I usually only use matcha and vanilla for flavorings; I would not add almond extract because I feel it would overwhelm the matcha flavor. Good "powdered green tea" is made from the whole leaf of quality green tea, either Tencha in the case of matcha, or sencha leaves in the case of powdered sencha. It is not just a freeze-dried instant green tea along the lines of an instant coffee. But there are some lower-quality products on the market which may be something like that, and there are companies making supplies for bubble tea shops which might use other additives even if they are using some portion of real matcha. You can often find green tea powders at your local Japanese food market. I also offer some on my own web site. For cooking matcha, see the Three Tree Tea page. You might also try the powdered sencha, which I also offer; that page has some other ideas for using powdered green tea.

Yes, but not quite as thin... these are probably the same thickness as "egg roll wrappers" and rolled out. Mu shu wrappers are basically eggless crepes. Actually I meant cabbage in the generic sense; his recipe called for "Chinese white cabbage", which I believe is essentially the same as Napa.

These are lightly toasted in a pan and might be wrapped at the table by guests, right? Kenneth Lo, a UK-based Chinese restaurateur, had a recipe that called for using wheat-based "egg roll wrappers" cooked on a griddle until a little bubbly, on each side, then wrapped around simple stir-fried vegetable fillings (bean prouts and ginger, maybe ja tsai pickles and cabbage, some sesame-oil and soy sauce seasoned mushrooms/carrots/celery, etc. He said these are almost never served in the "West". It seems like a Chinese taco or piadina.

This is a bit ambiguous, but generally the recommendation I hear is to pick ones that feel heavier than they look. Also, firm is usually better. If the bottom starts to be mushy or slightly moldy they are likely past their prime. The bumps don't seem to be a big problem for flavor; they just make it harder to use for whole-kabocha presentations since the bumps could be distracting. This time of year I find that most kabocha are too pale to use, but your mileage may vary depending on where yours are grown. I usually start looking for kabocha in late fall. In Seattle September is still a little soon for the best squashes, and February or early March is the end of the season for good ones. As for moisture level, I adjust this with the cooking method. If they look moist I might pan roast them. If they look dry I make sure they are oven-steamed (halved, flesh down, in a pool of water). If I need them to be very moist I'll steam them with a bamboo steamer.

I don't think so; you're right about the main point in that ocean fish is more suitable for sushi than river fish, which usually needs to be cooked; but vegetarian sushi shouldn't have been an inland development... Sushi originated as a Tokyo (Edo) food and, according to Gaku Homma at least (author, Japanese Country Cooking), the sushi we now know originated as a method of preserving fish, roughly in the 18th century if I remember correctly. Rice would be wrapped around raw fish and would become sour as the rice fermented. This effect was eventually simulated with vinegar, thus one of the possible renderings for the word "sushi" as "vinegared things"). As for more common renderings, both 鮨 (sushi) and 鮓 (sushi) are probably best translated as seasoned rice, even though the radical for rice never appears. The other rendering, 寿司, is probably an "ateji" (sort of "poetic license") but has a character for "longevity" and a character for "rule or administer". (Sorry for those of you that don't have Japanese support on your systems). Adding pickled vegetables to sushi wasn't a big stretch. It certainly didn't require going "inland". Except for cabbage, raw vegetables were once quite rarely consumed in Japan, but pickled (tsukemono), blanched (ohitashi), poached (nimono), or sweetened-vinegared (sunomono) were quite common. Inari-zushi (soybean puffs with seasoned rice) might not have appeared without the presence of Buddhist temples, but it's not typically purely vegetarian either. Other kinds of "sushi" like Gaku's "Wanko-zushi" (vinegared rice with seasoned fish or other items served in tiny bowls) developed in other regions than the Kantou/Tokyo area. As far as I know, no sushi emerged in inland areas at all until the advent of refrigerated transport. Since I am vegetarian, I haven't spent a lot of time in sushi places in Japan, but simple pickled vegetable based fillings are common enough in Japan... One high end place I went to in Ginza had various simple offerings. It's probably easier to completely avoid fish in a sushi place than in a noodle shop or izakaya, where dried fish is used in soup stocks and as a garnish pervasively. It's a little easier if for someone willing eat tamago-yaki, ikura, uni, etc. One time I had some yuba-based "nigiri-zushi" in a restaurant called Yuuan in Nishi-shinjuku, which was quite nice; there were some other pickled toppings and myouga. The concept was well executed and probably nearly impossible to replicate in the US, where we have a paucity of sources for fresh yuba. One thing that I think distinguishes U.S. preparations of sushi from Japanese is that most Japanese preparations are incredibly simple, and therefore require better quality ingredients due to a lack of competing flavors. I suspect the emergence of the California roll, the spider roll, the cream cheese monstrosities and so on resulted from problems obtaining good quality raw fish, and the strange rarity of the skill of producing simple, clean-tasting dishes from excellent ingredients. This extends to other areas of Japanese cuisine rendered in the US; most Japanese dishes require less elaborate preparation and kitchen equipment than your average casserole. Raw avocado, of course, is pretty much limited to the US and non-Japanese locales when incorporated into sushi. (added inari note)

A Hong Kong friend of mine who was living in Seattle until a couple years ago had nothing but scorn for Purple Dot. She was really unhappy with the food there. I only went there once, prior to the "new management" banners. I thought the food was incredibly uninteresting, though the fruit or bubble drink I had was nice enough... I've forgotten what I ordered at the time. I also remember a similarly unwanted amount of grease. Another importer I know who works in the I.D. was convinced their "new management" sign was just a ploy to re-attract customers who have been disappointed before. I'm not quite that excited about it. Fort St. George was nice enough when it opened, back when the building was called "Play Center Yume," but I don't feel that much of a compulsion to go there. I have, on the other hand, hunted down a kabocha gratin or wafuu spaghetti from time to time in Japan.

Essentially the same... If you order "shochu" in Japanese at Maekawa, they will ask you if you want Iichiko or Jinro. If you're in a part of the planet where the shochu selection is not tightly controlled by a state liquor board, you might have a wine-list like assortment of choices, including sweet potato-based, various assortment of grain based, and so on. One of my business meetings on Monday extended into dinner at Maekawa. The person I was meeting was heading back to Portland within an hour or so, so we skipped the shochu. I think he was hoping for ochazuke, but it wasn't on the menu and he wasn't willing to make a special order. I later stopped later at Crave for wine and cheese with a friend of mine. corrected typo

The one dish I always (usually) order at Maekawa is the renkon butter. I'm actually a vegetarian and try fruitlessly to avoid katsuobushi when I am in Japan, but I don't mind it too much; I just avoid eating huge amounts of it. My vegetarian habit has for the last 7 years or so been mostly built on taste preferences and not on a lot of ideology. The one think I will say, though, is that recently grated katsuo tastes much nicer than the prepackaged stuff, and also thicker shavings taste less bitter than thin ones, which probably lose a lot of the good volatile flavor compounds from exposure of more surface area to air. (Edit: I'd like to point out that the "thicker shavings" comment applies to the pre-packaged variety. If you're going to use them right away, shaving the katsuobushi thin is just right).

In Seattle, I think we start getting them fresh for reasonable prices in July or so. China was exporting them in obscene quantities to everywhere outside Florida last year. The start of the season they were $5.99/lb or roughly $13.20/kg; at the end it went down to about $1.99/lb or $4.40/kg. I think I got mine somewhere in the middle mostly. I think China has been exporting fruits to Japan particularly aggressively of late, so I would expect your prices for fresh or frozen ones to be similar (add up to 50% for the extra distribution and sales layers in Japan ). Local strawberries, by which I mean ones grown in Washington state instead of California, should be coming to market soon, so maybe I should play around. I like the idea of a strawberry liqueur though I am a little worried about the results since the alcohol soluble flavor compounds might come off a little artificial. I was planning on making a rhubarb-strawberry sorbet if nothing else.

It occurred me that a popular (?) infused alcoholic beverage in China involves a cobra in a jar of 25-40% neutral spirits. A few years ago I won such a jar of cobra booze when dining in a Beijing-area Cantonese restaurant near my former company's office. The cobra was still in there, all coiled up. I think it belongs on A Cook's Tour, if Tony Bourdain didn't vomit it up on an episode I missed. My understanding was that this was supposed to have some aphrodisiac or medicinal effect. I like to think of myself as reasonably adventurous. There's not one vegetable I won't eat, and, as vegetarians go, I'm rather flexible: I don't cause scenes when dining in Japan or China when surprised by some undeclared ingredient, and I've been known to cook the occasional bit of seafood. I grilled some squid up for some friends who were surprised at how tender it was, and I even tasted it to make sure I wasn't going to kill them. But I graciously offered the lucky draw gift to my Chinese colleague, who must have made better use of it than I could. I thought there's not much chance I could get a few of liters of spirits surrounding a large reptile through customs coming back to the US... In any event, if you need additional inspiration for Asian spirits, do you know any cobra ranchers in your neighborhood?

Inspired by zunda with shiratama I ate somewhere in Japan, I have twice tried making edamame ice cream. I'm still trying to get the proportions right, but the second time I made it it was a bit better. Last time I made it was a few months ago. I was trying to get the fat content to about that of premium ice cream for about 15% fat content, so I used the nutritional information to figure out the fat content of the edamame, the milk and the cream. I boiled what I believe was about 2 cups of shelled edamame (using a Japanese rice measure probably more like 2.5 cups) in lightly salted water. I ground the edamame in a food processor (a small one which is an attachment to a multipurpose hand mixer) in small batches with some of the sugar a little bit of milk. If I remember correctly, it was about 2 cups edamame, 1 cup sugar, 1 cup cream, and 1.5-2 cups milk. Due to the density change from ground edamame and dissolved sugar, I think this made about 4.5-5 cups liquid which is about right for my 6 cup ice cream machine after expansion. The flavor was pretty nice, especially when drizzled with kuromitsu. I've found an edamame gelato at a gelato shop in Japan before but mine was more smooth; I had ground the edamame down to a find paste; they mixed in some whole edamame I think. I'll try to make it again so I can offer more precise guidance. Edit: changed description of zunda