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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

“With each new course, he offers up little bites of the ethos that drives his cooking, the tastes and the words playing off each other like a kaiseki echo chamber. Ark shell, a bulging, bright orange clam peeking out of its dark shell, barely cooked, dusted with seaweed salt. "To add things is easy; to take them away is the challenge." Bamboo, cut into wedges, boiled in mountain water and served in a wide, shallow bowl with nothing but the cooking liquid. "How can we make the ingredient taste more like itself?With heat, with water, with knifework." Tempura: a single large clam, cloaked in a pale, soft batter with more chew than crunch. The clam snaps under gentle pressure, releasing a warm ocean of umami. "I want to make a message to the guest: this is the best possible way to cook this ingredient." A meaty fillet of eel wrapped around a thumb of burdock root, glazed with soy and mirin, grilled until crispy: a three-bite explosion that leaves you desperate for more. "The meal must go up and down, following strong flavors with subtle flavors, setting the right tone for the diner." And it does, rising and falling, ebbing and flowing, until the last frothy drop of matcha is gone, signaling the end of the meal.”

CoursesSeafoodFlavorsEthosKyotoJapanese FoodBambooTempura
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“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.”

CoursesSeafoodMushroomsFather And SonKyotoSurf And TurfJapanese CookingTempuraMiso SoupWagyu Beef
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“He's on to sashimi now, fanning and curling slices of snapper and fugu into white roses on his cutting board. Before Toshio can plate the slices, Shunichi reaches over and calmly replaces the serving plate his son has chosen with an Edo-era ceramic rectangle more to his liking. Three pieces of tempura- shrimp, eggplant, new onion- emerge hissing and golden from the black iron pot in the corner, and Toshio arranges them on small plates with wedges of Japanese lime. Before the tempura goes out, Shunichi sneaks in a few extra granules of salt while Toshio's not looking. By now Dad is shadowing his son's every move. As Toshio waves a thin plank of sea cucumber eggs over the charcoal fire, his dad leans gently over his shoulder. "Be careful. You don't want to cook it. You just want to release its aroma." Toshio places a fried silverfish spine on a craggy ceramic plate, tucks grated yuzu and sansho flowers into its ribs, then lays a sliver of the dried eggs over the top. The bones shatter like a potato chip, and the sea cucumber detonates in my mouth.”

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