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Rice, Noodle, Fish: Deep Travels Through Japan's Food Culture

Book by Matt Goulding · 3 quotes · Kyoto, Hokkaido, Japanese Food

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Rice, Noodle, Fish: Deep Travels Through Japan's Food Culture Quotes

“We start with a next-generation miso soup: Kyoto's famous sweet white miso whisked with dashi made from lobster shells, with large chunks of tender claw meat and wilted spinach bobbing on the soup's surface. The son takes a cube of topflight Wagyu off the grill, charred on the outside, rare in the center, and swaddles it with green onions and a scoop of melting sea urchin- a surf-and-turf to end all others. The father lays down a gorgeous ceramic plate with a poem painted on its surface. "From the sixteenth century," he tells us, then goes about constructing the dish with his son, piece by piece: First, a chunk of tilefish wrapped around a grilled matsutake mushroom stem. Then a thick triangle of grilled mushroom cap, plus another grilled stem the size of a D-sized battery, topped with mushroom miso. A pickled ginger shoot, a few tender soybeans, and the crowning touch, the tilefish skin, separated from its body and fried into a ripple wave of crunch. The rice course arrives in a small bamboo steamer. The young chef works quickly. He slices curtains of tuna belly from a massive, fat-streaked block, dips it briefly in house-made soy sauce, then lays it on the rice. Over the top he spoons a sauce of seaweed and crushed sesame seeds just as the tuna fat begins to melt into the grains below. A round of tempura comes next: a harvest moon of creamy pumpkin, a gold nugget of blowfish capped with a translucent daikon sauce, and finally a soft, custardy chunk of salmon liver, intensely fatty with a bitter edge, a flavor that I've never tasted before. The last savory course comes in a large ice block carved into the shape of a bowl. Inside, a nest of soba noodles tinted green with powdered matcha floating in a dashi charged with citrus and topped with a false quail egg, the white fashioned from grated daikon.”

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“Next comes chawan mushi, a delicate egg custard studded with wild mountain vegetables and surrounded by flowers from the bamboo forest. A dish as old as Kyoto itself. Toshio plucks two sacs of cod milt from the grill, slides them off the skewer into a squat clay box filled with bubbling miso. He comes back a second later with a scoop of konawata, pickled sea cucumber organs. A dish as new as the spring flowers blooming just outside the window. One by one, the market stars reappear on the plate. A black-and-gold lacquered bowl: Toshio pulls off the top to reveal thin slices of three-year-old virgin wild boar braised into sweet, savory submission with Kyoto white miso and chunks of root vegetables. Uni- Hokkaido and Kansai- the first atop a wedge of taro root dusted with rice flour and lightly fried, the other resting gently on a fried shiso leaf. Two bites, two urchins, an echo of the lesson in the market this morning.”

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“The real game, as I soon discover, is donburi. Donburi, often shortened to don, means "bowl," and the name encapsulates a vast array of rice bowls topped with delicious stuff: oyakodon (chicken and egg), unadon (grilled eel), tendon (tempura). As nice as meat and tempura and eel can be, the donburi of yours and mine and every sensible person's dreams is topped with a rainbow bounty of raw fish. Warm rice, cool fish, a dab of wasabi, a splash of soy- sushi, without the pageantry and without the price tag. At Kikuyo Shokudo Honten you will find more than three dozen varieties of seafood dons, including a kaleidoscopic combination of uni, salmon, ikura (salmon roe), quail eggs, and avocado. I opt for what I've come to call the Hokkaido Superhero's Special: scallops, salmon roe, hairy crab, and uni. It's ridiculous hyperbole to call a simple plate of food life changing, but as the tiny briny eggs pop and the sweet scallops dissolve and the uni melts like ocean Velveeta, I feel some tectonic shift taking place just below my surface.”

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