Around the World in 26 Meals: No. 17 - Japan (and a bit of Korea)
So, hi everyone. These were meant to be done by the end of summer 2022 at the latest and attentive readers may notice this post arriving in January 2023.
And yet here we are with the final Asia post - we’re not even across to the Americas let alone curving back to Europe for the countries west of Poland. We also have a few wildcards to come, things that I couldn’t do in sequence (wanting to do a large scale thing combined with COVID restrictions), or things that just didn’t have a clear geography.
The reason for this post’s lateness was just that 2022 was an insanely busy year. Aside from a nice holiday in August, it felt like my foot was on the accelerator non-stop from about May. At that time I was doing a lot of overtime and was also having the scuzzy kitchen you see in these photos stripped back to bare brick and redone (hooray!). The pace wasn’t quite that relentless later on in the year but enough was going on that I never quite recovered. Chronic fatigue is a kicker!
Ultimately 2022 was a blur, it was stressful, it was tiring but a lot of fun things happened in it. And currently I’m nearing the end of an absurdly long Christmas break having reduced my 2022 to-do list from terrifyingly large to pretty big, this post is part of trying to reduce that from pretty big to small and manageable! Onto the usual stuff, if you remember it after so long a gap.
Intro
We all know Japan, right? Honshu, Kyushu, Hokkaido, Shikoku. Samurai, haiku, kabuki, cherry blossom. Anime, pachinko and the undisputed pinaccle of human culture, Takeshi’s Castle (1986). Of course given this blog is about food perhaps my list of clichés should have been sushi, miso and katsu. And I should have littered the post with lucky cats and pictures of The Great Wave off Kanagawa just to be extra subtle.
In all seriousness I do find Japanese food particularly interesting, particularly at this phase of our round the world trip, as there is so much less bleeding together of cuisines here than is usual.
Sure, Japanese food relies on rice and soy sauce, it includes a lot of Chinese staples like tofu, and in the last couple of hundred years it’s been heavily influenced (and exerted influence on) broadly Western food. But ultimately most people would struggle to confuse Japanese food for anything else and many of the ingredients you’d use for Japanese food have little to no application outside it. That’s quite notable after months of cooking plotting a course all the way from Greece to Thailand where the end points are completely different but where each individual cuisine has very heavy and obvious influence from its neighbours and many such neighbours have extensive overlap. And we could probably make the same culinary journey as easily via, say, Central Asia, as via the route we’ve taken in these posts.
I haven’t any great insight into why this is - I know a little Japanese history but I only really know Japanese food history to the extent that it overlaps with the history of curry. It turns out that knowing who Tokugawa was doesn’t really help answer the question of why Japanese food isn’t as similar to Chinese as you’d expect!
As the name of this post would imply there’s also a bit of a Korean influence on some of the food I cooked - however the particular recipe in question struck me as more a Korean-influenced Japanese dish than anything else (this will make sense later). Despite my talking about how distinct Japanese food is it’s not a hermetically sealed bubble.
As such I’ll acknowledge the Korean influence on this meal, state that Korea has its own interesting history, culinary and otherwise, and is itself a very distinct cuisine (or cuisines), but leave any further talk on it for now. Perhaps when this series are done if I feel like revisiting it in a few one-off posts.
The book
First up we have Japaneasy (styled as JapanEasy on the back of the book, as that word looks ugly as sin I’ll not follow its lead) by Tim Anderson. Tim is American-born and has lived in the UK long enough that he’s as much British as American at this point. However he has lived in Japan, his higher education was specifically on Japanese food history, this is one of five books he’s written on Japanese food and he ran Japanese restaurants for six years - I think it’s safe to say his biography demonstrates that he knows what he’s talking about.
The second book to be considered is just called Ramen, subtitled Japanese Noodles and Small Dishes by Tove Nilsson. I’ve already made the “attentive readers may have noticed something obvious” joke already in this post so let’s just cut to the chase. Tove also isn’t Japanese, I’m not aware of her having lived in Japan or having any special connection to there - she’s just a lady who struggled to find good ramen in Sweden so decided to make her own, wrote a book and sometimes appears in magazines, TV and radio to talk about food. And fair play to that. Not everything needs a big story! Sometimes people just know how to cook without having a background in their area of culinary interest.
The final book I used was Our Korean Kitchen by Jordan Bourke and Rejina Pyo, and this was used solely to make kimchi.
I actually won’t really be mentioning this after this section as I don’t think judging a book by one recipe is fair. Particularly given the kimchi was more an ingredient than a meal. Suffice to say:
I should have just bought kimchi. Unlike ramen, it’s not just something easier to make in bulk but something very difficult to not make in bulk!
I love Korean food but never really got kimchi, it sounds as crazy as loving Italian food but not getting pasta but it’s true. I’d always assumed this was because I’d just not tried the good stuff but it turns out kimchi is just in “take it or leave it” territory for me. Perhaps it’s a taste I just am yet to acquire but I did spend far too long on this, and make far too much.
I’ve cooked from this book since, I think it's good and worth tracking down. This is fortunate as I’m not sure how much choice there is in any case for anyone UK-based to explore Korean food. For much of the 2010s the only books I could find were mostly memoir with a few impractical historical recipes scattered about and one written by a Korean-American where the blurb seemed very excited about having some Korean recipes using cup measurements (an enthusiasm I decidedly do not share).
Normally have a few pictures of the inside of each book when dissecting it, as I don’t intend to actually do that here then let’s have these pictures here instead. Nice graphic design and photography in my view but make up your own mind. Or don’t. I’m not your mum.
What I cooked (and adjustments)
The main event was kimchi ramen (guess what book that came from), which is topped with pork and egg as well as kimchi and vegetables. Naturally this required making a decent stock, also from Ramen, and I opted to make my own kimchi (which maybe I mentioned a couple of times already?) from Our Korean Kitchen.
Additionally I made two sides from Japaneasy - chicken thigh and spring onion yakitori (if unfamiliar, basically Japanese kebab, skewered meat and all that) and Japanese potato salad. One traditional Japanese food and one Japanese variant on a Western dish, presumably based more off the American than German style of potato salad.
Besides the standard garlic adjustment I make for every recipe here I made four further adjustments:
1) Using plain flour instead of rice flour in the kimchi (allowed by the recipe).
2) Using jaggery in place of palm sugar - it essentially is unrefined sugar and, for some reason, palm sugar was a lot harder to find in 2021 than it is now.
3) Subbing out the 64 degree egg called for in the ramen recipe. I love the idea of cooking an egg in a 64 degree waterbath, however even as someone with a dedicated steaming machine a waterbath seems a little bit excessive given the space I actually have to play with. I forgot to take a photo of the ramen at the very end so I’m afraid I don’t recall if I replaced it with a poached, boiled or fried egg.
4) Shockingly I subbed in muscovado sugar for demerera. Can you ever forgive me?
Cooking
Two rather time consuming things were needed for the ramen and were prepped the day ahead - stock and kimchi. Ideally kimchi should be made further ahead of time, at least a few days and up to a few months. I didn’t do this but I did continue eating it every now and then for some time, and don’t think a more aged kimchi would have drastically changed my enjoyment of the ramen either way.
Let’s start with the stock. Obviously a noodle soup like ramen is one of those things where you can’t just use a cube, you need a lot of ingredients and several hours. This particular one, titled pork and chicken broth in Ramen, requires water, chicken thigh, pork belly, shiitake mushrooms, kombu seaweed, spring onion and bonito flakes (katsuobushi). High class stuff for a stock - not just bones, offal or chicken wings.
Of course high class or not making a stock involves prepping veg and meat, combining everything and boiling it to high heaven for an extended period, removing scum periodically. So I think this whole process can be summarised in one picture slideshow! So far as plain stock goes it was very good.
In parallel I worked on my kimchi - the ingredients are Chinese cabbage, daikon/mooli, chives, ginger, garlic (asfoetida in my case), spring onion, onion, gochugaru red pepper (it’s in the red tub), flour, fish sauce, soy sauce, rice vinegar, palm sugar (jaggery in my case) and salt. Optionally it can also include salted shrimp called saeujeot but I couldn’t find any of that so I didn’t use it. Most of that'is pictured below. Choppy choppy!
The cabbage was split in half, coated in salt and partially covered in salt water for some time.
Ignore the stuff in the background, none of that will become immediately relevant in two paragraphs. These photos are definitely chronological.
Unusually for a pickling recipe it’s also necessary to make a flour paste and reduce it until gelatinous. This is visually unexciting but I’m posting the photos anyway.
The next step is to combine this flour paste with the “garlic”, ginger, onion, gochugaru, fish sauce, soy sauce, sugar and vinegar via the medium of food processor. This makes a semi-smooth paste.
The final steps in kimchi preparation are simply to combine the ingredients. Firstly the paste with the spring onion, chive and daikon and then this mix onto the cabbage leaves. At this stage everything can be put into a (sterilised!) jar and left to ferment for ideally a few days (in practice overnight).
Overall I wasn’t hugely impressed by this kimchi, but I think I simply don’t have the taste for it. I’m like a lager drinker who might one day get into ale or craft, but for now is just slightly nonplussed by the stuff.
Finally for my prep work I made some sweet soy sauce for the yakitori, I assume it’s teriyaki though the recipe mentions both that and kabayaki as possibilities without specifying what its end product actually is. I’m pretty sure I actually didn’t do this at the same time as the stock and kimchi but it logically fits better here and I break chronology all the time in these posts - so here we go.
Once again it’s fairly simple and concise to sum up how it’s made. Soy, mirin, either water or dashi (probably water or an instant dashi mix, I’ve some homemade dashi in my freezer but I think I made it at a later date), brown sugar, garlic (asfoetida in my case), unpeeled ginger and a thin cornflour slurry. Combine everything except the slurry, boil into a syrup, remove the solids, add the cornflour mix, cool. Bosh.
The “next day” comes and we’re onto the ramen. This consists of three components - the broth, the pork and the topping.
The broth needs the stock, gochujang (Korean chilli soya paste, if you remember from the China posts), Japanese-style soy sauce, ginger and the noodles themselves. Some of that isn’t really in shot in the upcoming photo but I’m sure you’ll live.
The pork needs … well, pork (fresh belly and belly repurposed from the stock, this seems odd to me but apparently it’s okay to do this). Less blindingly obviously it needs lager, mirin, brown sugar, more gochugaru, ginger, spring onion, garlic (asofetida) and salt. There’s also deep frying coming later so lots and lots of oil is needed.
The topping is egg, kimchi, beansprouts, spring onion and crushed black and white sesame seeds.
The various ingredients for the pork are intended for braising mixture - they are combined:
Real Budweiser here.
And then the meat is plopped in.
Some bowls are heated (by just keeping hot water in them until they’re to be used), the meat is cooked in the oven for a fairly lengthy time at a low heat, then quickly at a high heat, then is diced. Then it can go on a magical adventure.
A vertical photo like the kids do these days? I’m with it, I’m hip. Tak-a-tak-a-tak-a-tak-a.
Unfortunately the recipe suggests what I think is too long a magical adventure. Oh well.
At this point I reheat the stock and combine with the other broth ingredients in the serving bowls. The soba noodles are (very quickly) boiled and it all comes together.
The Crunchy Nut is an essential ingredient. If I’ve already made that weak joke in an earlier post then I’m making it again.
All being a relative term. The topping still needs to go on. Now it all comes together.
Except the egg. Forgot to take a photo of that. Soz.
The ramen was alright - on the worse end of acceptable if you’re going out for it. Aside from the pork being overdone I think it looks nice though. Personally I think this is more an issue with the recipe, some flaw in it that I didn’t see ahead of time rather than my mucking it up - but I interrogate that a bit later on. So let’s move on.
In parallel I worked on all the other stuff I was doing. First up, potato salad.
Potato (Maris Piper I think - it was a while ago), cucumber, carrot, ham, cornichons, chives, quails’ eggs, dashi powder (not pictured), mayonaisse (Kewpie brand), mustard. All goes chop chop.
Breaking the flow a bit for a tangent - quails’ eggs are apparently not a posh ingredient in Japan, whether food is high status is purely sociological and this is one of many examples of it. Another example is how Spam is perceived in different places across the world. There’s probably a reasonably interesting book (for someone else to write) just on this topic. And back to the food….
Obviously the potatoes need boiled. Let’s get that out of the way. (The eggs too but I think the timing on them was pretty tight, so no photo.)
Each component is now ready to combine (ignore the gochujang mix in the background, that was for the ramen).
We have potato salad!
Honestly I can’t fault it. The choice of quails’ egg and ham (over bacon) really lightens it and makes this a refreshing spin on the dish - it’s more elevated and less heavy than the American style but it has a certain satisfying creaminess the German style lacks. All three versions of potato salad have their place, as this one is a bit less filling than the others and is relatively finnicky to prepare, but I greatly enjoyed this and think it came out exactly as intended.
The final dish, yakitori, is pretty simple. Chicken thigh, spring onion, Chop, stick on skewer. I assume I also wet the skewers to prevent the meat sticking, but can’t actually remember.
Just like kebabs (except doner of course) you’d traditionally cook them over a flame, just like kebabs a grill is your silver medal.
It’s hard to get the phone camera to focus on the inside of a grill.
Unlike many kebabs yakitori has a glaze, in this case the teriyaki or possibly-not-teriyaki I made earlier, The cooking time is spent constantly turning the skewers and applying and reapplying the glaze - this would perhaps be easier with the traditional method versus the modern grill method! In any case we have delicious skewered meat.
These aren’t perfect but just needing a bit more finesse rather than any concrete changes to the method. I also probably should have sprinkled some sesame seeds on them. They’ll do.
And, normally this is where we’d have the shot of me getting ready to eat everything together, on a tray, in my lounge which somehow never quite has the right lighting for photos. However, this time I don’t have one, just one of the ramen, so I guess that’s not happening.
What I’d do differently
A rather brief section this time - I think the potato salad was perfect and the yakitori was good enough that improvements would come more from refining things than actually making large changes to the method. So everything I think was notably wrong was wrong with the ramen itself.
And, truth be told, I think a lot of that is just the recipe, I think I picked a slightly duff one.
The broth lacked the lovely clean taste that good ramen has despite the stock it was made from being fine. It was hard to describe in any way other than that specific clagginess you get with bad ramen. And, honestly, I think that was mostly due to the gochujang - it’s an ingredient that I love but I don’t think it worked well in this context, it worked against the ramen’s best features and the ramen worked against its best features.
The other fault is a bit obvious - that pork is overdone, though no more than the pork in the illustration for the recipe. The solution is pretty obvious, maybe tune down the heat by about twenty degrees and see what happens. But probably for a different pork ramen!
Oh, and I suppose I’d also not make kimchi from scratch again, for the reasons I stated earlier. It’s not worth it unless you’re going to get through a lot of it!
My view on the book
Firstly apologies for some blurry images here, I’m not quite sure what happened but a few photos are just bad.
First up, Japaneasy.
Curiously the book opens up with a quote:
“The samurai were thugs in frocks with stupid haircuts, and haiku poems are limericks that don’t make you laugh.”
Given Gill was actually pretty harsh on Japan in his writings (the famous quote “the three-stringed guitar is a sad waste of cat” actually comes from this very same paragraph) it seems an odd choice of opener. Admittedly it is funny, and he was similarly scathing about almost everything under the sun, but still. I suppose Gill was probably the kind of man who was funny in small doses and a bore in excess, and such a short quote is a small dose.
Strangeness aside I think this quote demonstrates the tone of the book - friendly, jocular and humorous. The title also indicates how hard the book tries to make Japanese food not seem threatening, I’m not quite sure why the title didn’t put me off (“done quick”, “made easy” and so on are usually red flags in my view!), but overall this approach does give the book a slightly different vibe to what you’d expect from a serious cookbook. Like Gill, it’s fun in small doses - and this book is a small enough dose - but I would get very sick of it if there were too many other cookbooks taking this approach.
Indeed it does go a bit far even within this one book. There is one page, formatted as a discussion between the author and an imaginary reader, that’s a tad excessive. A lot of block capitals, a lot of exclamation marks, sometimes multiple ones per sentence. However it usually only goes so far as to adopt a light tone, make a few jokes of varying quality and show a little graphic describing the difficulty of preparation. This graphic almost invariably says the recipe is easy, though a few concede fiddliness or the need for practice.
This informal, non-threatening approach is extended to the graphic design - I thought this rather nifty (purely decorative) page at the end is a nice example of the book’s aesthetic:
Despite this Japaneasy doesn’t commit the cardinal sin of the “made easy” cookbook and dumb down its recipes - any simplicity comes from selection (and the variety attained from just simpler recipes is surprising) and, aside from stating that pre-made Japanese curry mix is about as good as prepping from scratch, the recipes are presented as is, specialist ingredients and all. These are also nicely described near the start of the book. This kind of glossary is a handy feature I always like to see.
Visually I do think the graphic design leads to a fair bit of excess white space at times (see the two recipe pages below) - the lovely photographs are useful and the amount of space allocated for the method is often well-utilised but the space used for the ingredients can be a bit excessive. This is a niggle, it doesn’t feel like padding, but I do think the clean and unthreatening look does the cookbook a minor disservice at times.
Despite my quibbles I think this is an excellent general purpose Japanese cookbook - it’s focused on easier dishes, granted (let’s just say its ramen recipes are very different from those of the other book!) but everything just works as intended. It’s nicely presented and contains a decent density of information, showing that these two things need not be in conflict, and covers a wide variety of meals from traditional Japanese to things that may be more reflective of the less traditional dishes Japanese people actually eat (no dodgy fruit sandwiches though!).
For a first time or generalist Japanese cookbook I see no reason to not heartily recommend this, though I don’t think this is the one Japanese cookbook for all conceivable needs. More complicated dishes and a discussion of regionality is beyond its scope and given every little place in Japan has a regional speciality there’s likely a lot to say about those things.
Onto Ramen. Right off the bat, I think I picked the wrong recipe to try (as stated earlier) so I won’t be recommending it, I also won’t be discouraging people from it. It looks like a good book where I just chose my sampler recipe badly but ultimately if I didn’t think what I cooked was great I can’t be certain.
Stylistically and tonally this is much more what you’d expect from a cookbook, so I have a fair bit less to say. It’s quite direct and manages to combine information in a way that is (usually) concise without being crowded, the two recipe pages pictured below being a good illustration of this:
There is one exception to this, where at the start of the book a lot of ingredients/equipment that may be of use are laid out in a double-page centrefold photograph with the descriptions on the page after, being somewhat excessive with use of space. However, in context this is probably the correct design choice - this looks a lot more slick and in keeping with the rest of the book than combining the photos and text on the same page. As the cookbook overall is reasonably information dense this doesn’t really rankle.
In the same vein we do also have some pages with rather striking photographs with only a loose connection to food. Once again, it fits the atmosphere of the book and once again, with the efficient use of space in the meat of the book it doesn’t feel like padding and ends up being a positive rather than a detriment.
Normally this is where I’d give my recommendation, or not, with any caveats or conditions and so end the post in a fairly organic way. Dear reader, I haven’t the knowledge to give said recommendation so this is where the blog post hits a brick wall and just stops. Bye!