Food on Nanikore

Bike Tour: Lakes, Tea and Senbei

Wed, 16 Dec 2015 06:46:17 +0000

It’d been quite a few weeks since I’d been out on the motorbike for a day trip, so when my old friend CS offered up the middle day of a 3 day weekend for a trip out in November, I was up for it, and so spent some time staring at my Touring Mapple book and Google Maps to see where we could put in a few hundred kilometres.

The Classy Meet Up

As I’m all about style and culture, I had decided we should meet up on the infamous 246 road before moving up into the mountains of central and western Kanagawa Prefecture. The meeting place: The Eastern Gods Truck Station. Well technically it’s the Toushin Truck Station, but the literal translation of the kanji sounds a lot better in my opinion. Yes, it’s a truck stop - a fair sized one too - with a restaurant, showers, some rooms, and of course ample parking for large trucks, and a smaller area for vans. We parked up in the latter car and van park, CS’s Triumph Tiger 1200 dwarfing some of the vans, whilst everything dwarfed my CB400.

A cup of tea and a catch-up later we were on the 246 for a little while before heading north on the 412 and then moving onto the 413 and pushing west. The 413 is a decent road - well surfaced, the odd narrow portion, with plenty of twisties to play on. For the most part you’re going along valleys, but at elevation, so expect some dampness and mist, especially on an overcast day like we were on. It was at this point I discovered the mist loved settling on my visor and stubbornly refused to roll off, so I need to sort that out.

Doushi Road

About half way along, we came across a rest area near the town of Doshi, and sailing past all those people in cars who like to queue for parking spaces, we parked up in the bike area which was packed with bikes and bikers - men, women and children of all ages, with all manner of bikes, trikes and quads. It was a good place to take a break, with people queuing for various hot snacks or grilled chicken, pork, vegetables , some tasty looking grilled fish, as well as a shop selling powdered radish roots, fresh veg and other things there was no way I could fit on my bike. In the end I had a bottle of hot lemon juice from the the vending machine. A missed opportunity in retrospect - I should have queued for the grilled fish.

Back on the road, more twisties, but then a slower section in traffic around lake Yamanaka. I always like the lakes around Mt. Fuji, especially for the novelty ferries. I didn’t take a picture, but Yamanaka had the giant swan ferry on the water as we rode past.

Another missed food opportunity here: we went past several nice local places and pulled away from the commercialized lake area,and only when we were stopping for some fuel did we decide we were hungry, by which point our only real option was the nearby Royal Host. It’s perfectly acceptable as a place to eat, but as a franchise, we’d usually avoid it.

As CS has a GPS system, he oddly likes to make use of it, and due to this, it likes to run him a merry jaunt on occasion. This time, instead of taking us to a small tea house on a mountain road I had spied on Google Maps, it decided we really wanted to sit in more traffic around the outskirts of the larger Kawaguchi lake in a market stalls area where it continued to confidently claim the tea shop was always 3 minutes away,.

After fifteen minutes, we called it out, told it we weren’t happy, did U-turns and followed my direction following my paper map. That was better. Or at least it was better for a while, since on the 137, we were to look for road 708, a svelte mountain road where this legendary tea shop would be waiting for us. Unfortunately CS was a couple of cars in front of me, and he missed the turn. This left me bombing up the road thinking I was way behind, arriving at the beautiful tea-shop and realising it was just me. Long story short, CS did finally locate the place, and it was worth it.

Tea Time

It’s called Tenkachaya (天下茶屋), as in, ‘whole world under heaven’ tea shop. They also make and sell senbei rice crackers. There’s no parking as such, and the collection of cars and bikes basically hug the sides of the road. Inside it’s all wood, modestly lit, and very relaxing. The staff were really friendly, and explained what was available in the shop and on the menu. That’s when we noticed we’d misunderstood something. They do sell tea - indeed they give you a complimentary cup when you sit down - but their speciality is a blend coffee. I had to have one, and yes, it was very good. Also, the senbei were sweet, sort of lemon flavoured, and the staff advised us to break them in their plastic wrappers before eating because they could probably stop a bullet. They do taste rather good though, so we bought some as omiyage to take away too. It’s by itself really on that 708 road, which the tunnel making it far quicker to get to and from the lake, but it is worth the ride/drive up for a rest stop and to take in the view.

After that good rest we started winding our way towards the Chuo expressway, joining at it’s southern starting point, and following it east. There was plenty of traffic - perhaps people returning Sunday night to avoid the read traffic insanity of the Monday return, so we ended up filtering for a couple of kilometres before stopping before the Hachioji junction where we parted ways. My route would take me onto the newer Ken-O extension south. I like the road as it’s not so busy, there’s plenty of distance between junctions, and even though there aren’t yet service areas, it’s a relaxing ride though I should note, there’s no street lights along some sections, so with just me on my bike, even with the headlight on, it felt oddly isolated.

The only notable thing on that final stretch was that all the auto-payment arches (ETC) were broken on my exit ramp, so I had to stop and get off my bike, get my bike seat off to give the chap on the gate my ETC card so he could manually check it through, then put it all back together. I’ve never had to do that before. Odd really.

All in all a good day out.

(An aside here: the lake is called Kawaguchiko. That ‘ko’ denotes lake [湖], and though most signs in English say Lake Kawaguchiko, it’s technically Lake Kawaguchi I think).

Calligraphy and Food

Fri, 20 Nov 2015 20:25:48 +0000

We were out in the agricultural hills of central Kanagawa prefecture a couple of weeks ago, and stopped off at the 90 year old home of the Hekkoro / Gonbachi restaurant. It’s an old style wooden Japanese farm house, old wooden floors, a casual table layout, and the back is adorned with calligraphy and artwork from local art classes, mainly from children. Why not mix calligraphy and food?

Aside from serving some very decent food using local vegetables and making dishes from noodles to curry, it also allows you to read some of the books they have, and even do some shodou(書道 /calligraphy), which a couple of junior high school kids did actually do whilst we were there. On the day we went it was raining, and as you can see, the condensation on the doors to the garden was a relaxing backdrop to the calligraphy table.

It’s yet another interesting local place, a little bit out there, but worth a look if you’re anywhere near the vicinity. It has it’s own small gravel carpark, which isn’t too difficult to find from the road, and since it was raining quite heavily on the day we were there, it meant a short run from the car to the restaurant itself.

I had the black bean curry, and yes, it was very good. It’s also good to know that you’re eating local produce, and that it’s really fresh, which adds to the taste and the whole atmosphere of the place.

Interestingly, and this likely due to the local produce, they also have a page dedicated to local radiation readings, since the Fukushima disaster in 2011. That’s a thoughtful touch, even almost ten years on.

The Baker and the Bromate

Tue, 12 Jul 2011 17:39:15 +0000

Chances are if you go to buy bread in Japan, the vast majority of it in most supermarkets comes from the Yamazaki Baking Co. and in general, it tastes pretty good. ( TSE Ticker code: 2212 Equity GP)

I was surprised then, to read in a few news articles about their usage of a fairly suspect ingredient:

“They are the only Japanese baked goods company who use potassium bromate in their bread; all Japanese baking industry companies voluntarily ceased using it in 1980 due to suspicions of carcinogenicity, but Yamazaki resumed in 2005.”

Wikipedia

I have to say that just reading that, and confirming it across several relatively respectable news stories and agencies, we effectively stopped buying Yamazaki bread and most of their other products - not actually through any fear of getting cancer from the bread, but just because it seemed irrational to continue using a suspect ingredient, when other ‘safe’ flour / dough enhancers were available.

Generally, we now buy Pasco when we do buy bread, but I did wonder whether or not this practice had crept in in other parts of the Japanese market - from Pasco’s website though, apparently not - it’s interesting they have that page devoted to it (and nicely, it’s in a URL link called ‘feeling’).

“Pasco eliminated the use of potassium bromate in 1980, and we continue to strongly stand against the use of it. We have no plans to start using it in the future. Pasco continues to observe the self-imposed control measures established by the Japan Baking Industry Association Corp. in 1992.Pasco uses vitamin C (L-ascorbic acid) as a safe alternative to potassium bromate. "

Potassium Bromate is indeed a fairly controversial chemical - broadly used historically to improve various attributes of bread dough as a flour enhancer, though through the 1970’s a body of evidence grew that it may be carcinogenic, or at least made the mutation of cells more likely.

In the European Union, it goes by the descriptive alternate name of E924. Those of us from Europe will be fairly familiar with the ‘E’ number system, which symbolically held the meaning that a food was more made of chemicals, than real ingredients, if you know what I mean. Nowadays I wonder if the E number system was to distract us from what these things actually were.

Interestingly, in the UK’s Food Standards Authority database, E924 is only listed under revocations - [ link] , so apparently, it’s not allowed in the UK either - specifically having been revoked in 1990 - bakers can’t use it - the same goes for Canada (1994) and China (2005). In the US many companies were still using it in the 1990s, and it’s still legal and apparently well used today.

So why would Yamazaki Baking - and seemingly only Yamazaki Baking in Japan - start re-using this chemical since it, and many other companies stopped in 1980? Yes, they did actually stop, and only restarted in 2005.

Well, it seems there may be two reasons.

Firstly, they believe they’ve found a method of getting the chemical’s benefits, yet only using a minute amount, which wont cause health concerns as it shouldn’t end up in the final product on the shelf, as it is only used in the production process.

Secondly, but slightly more troubling, a blog article, from a fairly well regarded blog, suggested it was more interested in sticking to it’s founding family’s traditional recipe- [ link].

However, to take the first concept - a quick Google through Yamazaki’s website threw up two real hits on potassium bromate - one a gnarly white paper from 2004 entitled " The study of bromate residues in bread Part1 - Effect of Reducing Agents and Baking Procedure on the Residual Bromate in Bread” (no longer on their website it seems), and the second in their investor guide (also since removed).

From the whitepaper, the English summary states:

“Potassium bromate, which contributes to the formation of disulfide bonds in wheat protein in dough and increased gas-retaining capacity, has been used as a bread improver since the 1910s. However, it has been reported that potassium bromate has a mutagenicity based on experiments with rats. Thereby, the regulations in Japan stated that in the case of bread, residual bromate must be reduced or removed from the final products.”

So that essentially lays out the ground rules as Yamazaki saw them, in their own words - the key point seems to be final products. The summary goes on:

“Residual contents of potassium bromate in bread extracts prepared by the improved method were measured by high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) with post-column reaction for the coloring of bromate. No residual bromate was detected in Pullman-type breads with +- or +/mg potassium bromate added per kg of flour.”

As a note of explanation, a Pullman loaf is one baked in a long narrow tin, with a lid - that is, pretty much all of the square sliced bread in Japan. The summary goes on to note that:

“On the other hand, the residual bromate determined in open-top type bread with 9-30 mg potassium bromate added per kg of flour, was found localized on the top of crust put out of the baking pan. Reducing agents such as L- ascorbic acid (AsA), cysteine and glutathione and ferrous sulfate were added to the open-top type bread to reduce the residual bromate. Adding both AsA and ferrous sulfate accelerated the decrease in the residual bromate in the open top-type bread.”

I’m not a scientist but, what they’re saying is, they have to do this to say there shouldn’t be any Potassium Bromate in the bread after they’ve added even more chemicals. In 2005, the FDA in America noted as a post (co-authored by Yamazaki) detection techniques for Potassium Bromate which is an important requirement if something is only legal up to minute quantities in a baked product.

This seems to be a lot of trouble to go to to keep using a chemical largely frowned upon internationally, and which according to their competitors, there are acceptable alternatives available to, which suggests that the second point - because it’s a tradition - starts to seem all the more plausible?

Well, for another angle, let’s look at that second hit, the 2008 investor guide, from the section “Fiscal 2008 in Review” which generally paints a dismal economic picture :

“To maintain top levels of product safety and quality, despite the soaring cost of ingredients, particularly flour, we had to execute another round of price increases. Even though we had only just increased prices on some of our breads and Japanese- and Western-style confectionery in December 2007, we had to push through more increases in May 2008. Hoping to make the new prices more palatable to consumers, we emphasized the quality aspect of our products by applying a new technology to Pullman - type bread using an aqueous solution of potassium bromate as an oxidizing agent, and then, the technology were applied to Open-top bread and sweet buns.”

So there’s an economic justification too? I appreciate investor guides are dry tomes intended to attract funds and other interested parties into buying shares, bonds, whatever, but this is an interesting tack to take on what is I would have thought, a sensitive subject.

For a ‘defence’ of the use of Potassium Bromate, I had to go to The American Institute of Baking ( AIB), (which also has a Japanese site amateurishly done in Adobe GoLive 5) and [their paper](https://www.aibonline.org/press/SafeUsePotassiumBromate 09_08.pdf) " Commercial Baking Industry Guide For The Safe Use Of Potassium Bromate" [2008] but even they don’t seem overly confident. Though this is obviously a bit of a weak stance as an opener in the paper:

“Potassium bromate (KBrO3) has been used in limited ways and amounts by the baking industry for almost a century with no known health concern. It has been used in baking since at least 1914 …”

I’m not sure I put a lot of faith in something being safe since before penicillin, and decent analysis methods. However, they do go on:

“Concern about the potential harmful effects of potassium bromate was raised by Japanese researchers in the mid-1980s. While the research was inconclusive, some countries adopted a precautionary-principle response and removed potassium bromate from the approved list of dough conditioners. More recent research in Japan casts doubt on this level of concern, at least as it refers to the amounts of potassium bromate used in the baking industry, concluding that there is a threshold below which no adverse effects can be detected.”

I’m wondering if the more recent research was by Yamazaki Bakery. The paper does immediately point out though, and with it’s own bold emphasis:

“It is recognized that it is inappropriate to use potassium bromate in any product or production method which cannot be formulated without residues below the level of 20 ppb in the finished product.”

That’s not really a huge endorsement to me. However, the paper does a decent job, in basic terms explaining the reason why Potassium Bromate is used, and for that, the PDF is worth a download, and at 15 pages of text, worth a read.

So what we have is a chemical known to cause renal cancer in rats, at least, and which is controlled by amount in foods, or outright banned in many countries, and yet Yamazaki Bakery here in Japan have gone to a lot of effort to use it in their production system - again, I’m not saying it’s in the bread - it shouldn’t be - but why even use it? Is it really because old man Iijima did? Then the question becomes, if he were alive today, would he still use it?

Recipe - Chicken Kiev

Sun, 15 May 2011 12:52:13 +0000

I’ve always liked chicken Kiev, though usually it’s been in a restaurant, or from a pre-made one back when I lived in the UK. I like the idea (garlic butter in a bread crumbed chicken breast) so I thought I’d have a go at a recipe for Chicken Kiev myself, from (almost) first principles.

I looked around and found quite a few recipes, but in the end they morphed something of my own. Some suggested deeper frying in corn oil which didn’t appeal to me, so I went for a more oven based approach with olive oil.

This was for two adults and a child. So then, the most important part:

485g of chicken (2 breasts)
1 egg
2 tblspn of flour
chicken filling: 1 tblspn of lemon juice
2 large cloves of garlic, chopped
~100g of butter salt and pepper
‘herbs’ - I used some parsley from the garden but tarragon seems popular
breadcrumbs - 100g from 3 slices of rye bread - dried a bit then blended (with no crusts in there!)

Oven: pre-heat to 200C

Prepare the chicken by cutting along the thickest part of the chicken breast to form a pocket as large as possible - you may even want to remove some of the chicken for this (I didn’t though).

Get all your filling together in a large bowl, and mix with a fork until it’s well mixed together, then leave it to sit.

Get three plates or bowls, and put a couple of tablespoons of flour in one, and in the other beat the egg. In the third bowl we want fresh breadcrumbs - get two or three slices of bread, minus the crusts, blend them for a couple of minutes and then put them in the bowl and let then dry a little.

Now stuff the butter/garlic mixture into the pocket - really pack it in there - then drag it in the flour, then the beaten egg, then roll in the breadcrumbs. I then closed the pocket with a couple of wooden skewers to keep as much butter in the chicken as possible.

Heat up a very thin layer of olive oil in a frying pan, and place the chicken in it, turning when it looks browned. Now put all of this (including the olive oil) into the 200C pre heated oven for 18-20mins. We have a handle-less frying pan which we simply placed in the oven, but an oven tray would be fine too.

Then, when the time is up, serve and eat! We had ours with boiled new potatoes and some pickles since it was a hot day - you can use the butter/olive oil in the oven tray as some sauce for the potatoes.

I really enjoyed it, though I’d like to make my own bread for the breadcrumbs too if I had time. The only thing I’d say is that it might be better going for smaller chicken breasts.

If you’re in the mood for something else along similar lines, try ‘ double stuffed pork chicken breasts’, which are delicious too, if something of a meat overload.

Pokemon and One Piece

Tue, 28 Dec 2010 14:08:52 +0000

Just a bit of a random post here, based on a couple of snaps for Pokemon and One Piece. I wouldn’t even go so far as to say photos.

We ordered some pizza the other day from Dominos.jp and it arrived not only in a One Piece box, but also with a free mug! It doesn’t get much better than that for the average One Piece fan.

As I get older and I have kids, I decided to pick up a cheap English language copy of Pokemon Soulsilver for my DS and within the first thirty minutes, what seemed to be an exercise in game grind took and unexpected upswing:

“There’s a large, formidable tree that looks like it can be headbutted!”

You know, you’re right; I should approach more immovable objects with that kind of attitude.

Recipe: Tsukune

Sat, 30 Oct 2010 01:48:49 +0000

Just like the recipe I put up before for misoshiru, I’m playing safe with another Japanese dish in that there are lots of different versions, so no-one can say I’m definitively wrong so this is a recipe for tsukune.

Tsukune is essentially a chicken ‘meatball’, often cooked over a flame or hot coals in restaurants - especially in yakitoriya. I quite like tsukun e so I thought I’d cook my own a bit more over the summer since they’re great over BBQ, and they’re really simple.

Ingredients:

400g of fresh chicken breast (no skin!)

~5g of fresh garlic (1 clove)

75g of diced fresh onion

1 tablespoon of olive oil

a little Tabasco sauce

a little soy sauce (usukuchi)

salt and black pepper

some tare sauce

some small wooden skewer/kebab sticks

a blender

The Making Bit

First, chop up all the chicken into chunks into a bowl, then add the olive oil, Tabasco, soy sauce , salt and pepper and stir it up to get it all well mixed in and whilst it’s sitting, dice up the onion and garlic quite finely, and add that to the chicken, stirring it in well.You can let it sit a bit now, and put your skewers into water, which should reduce the amount they burn later on.

Next, get your blender / food processor ready. In all honesty, you can just keep chopping the chicken and other ingredients up to get the consistency you want, but the blender is going to save you time - however, we’re aiming for a meatball type consistency, not a paste! Put everything in and work it through - chicken is quite fibrous, so you need to make sure you’ve got all the large chunks cut down. The onion should still be visible.

Once you’re happy it all looks right and consistent, ball it up, with a size of about an inch (~2.5cm) across. The mixture can be sticky, so don’t be afraid to use some flour to keep them from sticking to the plate and everything else, and keep your fingers wet when picking the mixture up.

Then simply place a few on each skewer and we’re ready to cook. When we aren’t having a BBQ, I tend to use our ridged Le Creuset skillet, but you can also grill them. Once they’re cooked through you can server them with a tare sauce.

As an option, you can put some fresh parsley or other herbs into the mixture, and cook with a little olive oil. you can also serve with some sliced lemon between each ball.

If anyone has any suggestions - please put them in the comments.

Recipe: Miso Shiru

Mon, 11 Oct 2010 19:22:51 +0000

I just thought I’d post on a little bit of simple cooking for a change, and something fairly synonymous with Japan - miso shiru. This is one of the recipes I’ve kind of worked along with of late - a carrot and daikon vegetable one.

I’m a big fan of soups generally, growing up with Scotch broth and chunky vegetable soups in the UK, so I tend to go a little heavier in this recipe than others.

Ingredients:
1 litre of water
150g of daikon
80g of carrots
100g of miso/dashi paste
135g of kinu tofu
Some Worcester sauce
Some wakame (type of seaweed)

Cooking time: 20-30mins. (to whatever). Makes 4-5 bowls worth.

First off, get the water boiling in a decent sized pan. Add the carrots and daikon to this. I tend to leave the vegetables chunky - about 1cm+ on a side - and since carrots and daikon are fairly hard, you want to soften them up a little before adding the rest of the ingredients.

This is when I usually add a few drops of Worcester sauce, which some people don’t go for, but I find it a bit more subtle than soy or bare salt, but still adding something to the background flavour.

Once the vegetables have softened up a little I take it off the boil, then slowly stir in the miso-dashi paste. I’m lazy - I don’t make my own dashi, and since I’ve seen nice old ladies buying the same stuff I use, it must be legitimate, right? I just don’t have time for boiling up various fish and such. Either way, it tastes pretty good.

Now is a good time to add wakame if that’s your thing, and after a few more minutes, add the tofu, once you’ve sliced that to the size you like. I find it prudent not to cut it too small, especially with kinu tofu, so it’s still easy to retrieve from the bowl when you’re eating, and so that it doesn’t fall to pieces if it’s sat cooking for any period of time.

Keep it going for a few more minutes, by which time the daikon should be cooked and the tofu will be mixed through and then serve in a small bowl.

For those not too familiar, you can usually get two main types of tofu in the supermarkets here - kinu （絹）and momen (木綿) - named after how they’re made, being from silk and cotton sieves respectively. The kinu tofus are a bit smoother, but some prefer the more solid momen variety.

A couple of friends have commented that I use more miso-dashi than they would, and from having had a lot of miso shiru in various restaurants, that’s probably true, so you might want to reduce the amount of miso. The truth is, I like miso. I like miso ramen. I like miso onigiri.

Anyway, I thought I’d throw this simple recipe out there but it’s so simple it seems just too obvious. Any tips or family recipes always appreciated.

miso dashi

Hard Road Bento

Sun, 15 Feb 2009 14:19:50 +0000

I needed to get a new bento box (that’s a Japanese lunch-box). Now, I’ve been here long enough to sort of filter out, or actually understand some of the interesting English language notes on some products, but this one kind of struck me as just being a little serious - it’s a hard road bento:

“The road of the life will become very hard. But we must overcome it.”

my bento box

That’s a pretty heavy message for reading over lunch.

Spoon fed

Tue, 01 Jun 2004 13:34:43 +0000

My long suffering partner and I decided to go out for a meal to the ‘Hiro’ restaurant on the 35th floor of Maru Building in front of Tokyo station. It’s a beautiful looking place, with an amazing view over Tokyo, which looked fabulous as the sun set. The food, as you would expect, comes in many small courses, each well made and presented, but the course that really impressed us was the caviar and rice entree, which, as it was only really a mouthful’s worth, came all ready on a spoon.

When the waiter presented it, he exclaimed “You may be surprised…it looks like sushi but it’s not!”. We were thinking it looked like a few bits of rice and caviar on a spoon. I’ve had small courses before, but not one where it came pre-attached to the cutlery.

We kind of looked at each other for a second, and at some of the other diners…was this a sample? Like a waiter presenting a taster glass of wine before pouring for all? Nope, that was it, though I should say that it was absolutely delicious.

All said, ‘Hiro’ is a great place for a date or a special occassion. Prices for dinner start at 9,000yen for a set meal, so I’ll be living off pot noodles and Yoshinoya for a while.

Gososamadeshita!