Okonomiyaki: The Pancake With The Mostest

In my quest to eat lots of really yummy food copiously, well, and often, the okonomiyaki has often come across my plate. Oddly, not many restaurants serve it, but it is a speciality dish that actually hearkens from Hiroshima. (Baser) This dish literally translates: "okonomi" ("whatever you want") "yaki" ("grilled"), and it's the perfect dish for getting rid of leftovers (Baser). The exact concoction of the first okonomiyaki is not concrete, but it was believed to have come together sometime in the 17th to 18th century. (Baser)

Essentially, an okonomiyaki is a cabbage and flour-based pancake that you can throw a little bit of everything into: pork, seafood, veggies, etc, and you top it off with some delicious okonomiyaki sauce, Japanese mayonnaise, and lots and lots of fish flakes.

I have often compared okonomiyaki to pizza. The texture is very similar and it's just as filling and viscerally satisfying. However, in reading this article, I found out that, similar to New York versus Chicago style pizza, there's a contest between Osaka and Hiroshima for the best okonomiyaki! Osakans like to use cabbage, flour, and egg for a particularly thick pancake, then add "... anything from shrimp, octopus, mochi to cheese added in, smothered in the authentic okonomiyaki sauce made of dates and Worcester sauce and powdered with dried seaweed and bonito flakes." (Baser)

However, in Hiroshima, the pancake is done in layers, then the chef will "... top it with a mountain of cabbage, grill it down, flip and top it with a cake of grilled soba noodles, also dripped with the signature sauce." (Baser)


Link: http://theplate.nationalgeographic.com/2015/08/04/beyond-the-bomb-hiroshimas-beloved-okonomiyaki-pancake/

Ramen: It's What's For Dinner!

Ramen is a dish closely associated with Japanese culture, and it has a huge popularity in Japan. That's not surprising- what other dish comes with noodles, delicious broth, savory meat, lots of veggies, and an egg that's been soft boiled to perfection to make the broth taste even richer? (Actually a lot of Japanese dishes, but to this ramen-obsessed reader, this is honestly the perfect "Noodle to Meat to Weeping with Delight ratio", so bear with me here.)

(Something similar to what Chinese "soba" would have looked like)

Yet, ramen is not, intrinsically, a Japanese dish. The ramen noodle originally comes from China- ramen noodles are made with kansui, a mixture of baking soda and water, and gives ramen noodles their "characteristic yellow color" (Herman) There are a couple of different origin stories to ramen, and that's not terribly surprising when you're a dish that's arguably as epic as Batman. The first theory is that, "... a scholar named Shu Shunsui brought the recipe with him when he escaped Manchu rule in China to serve as an advisor to feudal lord Tokugawa Mitsukuni" (Herman), and, it's a cool story, but the problem is that there are no historical records of any scholar by that name ever existing. (Herman)

(The original Nankin Senryo)

So, ramen as we know it today, according to NYU professor, George Holt, probably came into existence around 1910, with, "the founding of Rai-Rai Ken in Tokyo (not to be confused with the shop of the same name in New York’s East Village) by a customs agent who’d worked in Yokohama’s Chinatown." (Herman) The restaurant served shina (the Japanese word for China) and soba (a word for a Japanese noodle dish that already existed). It was really popular with blue collar workers because it was cheap and extremely filling (Herman), but then ramen took a more subversive meaning in the 1930's during the Japanese Rape of Nanjing- take for example, a ramen shop known as Nankin Senryo, which literally translates to "flower", but also can be taken to mean "Nanjing occupation". (Herman) Soldiers and radically political students took a liking to ramen at this time, but that all came to an end during the food shortages of World War II in Japan. (Herman)


When instant ramen noodles were reintroduced in the 1950's, they were not actually aimed at low income people- they were aimed at "... middle-class women and children: supermarket food providing whole, nutritious meals to nuclear families, as opposed to the fare dished out in ramen shops to students and workers flocking to reindustrializing cities by the thousands." (Herman)
Ramen became extremely popular again, and in a Japan with a recovering economy, it became a patriotic dish, something uniquely Japanese, and a powerful counter to the alternative European foods that were being shipped into Japan after the war ended. (Herman)


In short, ramen is a tasty, piping hot treat, with a savory history you can take a bite out of- and, drat, I'm hungry now.

Link: http://firstwefeast.com/eat/2014/05/george-solt-on-the-messy-history-of-ramen

(My personal SF favorite: Clam and garlic ramen, courtesy of Ramen Izakaya in Downtown SF!)

A Brief History of Mochi!

Hello, everyone, and welcome to my blog! I am very excited about the upcoming Asian Area Studies course, and I felt that it seemed only right to do my first post on one of the many amazing aspects of Japanese culture: the food. As someone with quite a bit of a sweet tooth, mochi have always been one of my favorite dishes, and the history of mochi is really quite an interesting one! While we know it as usually being filled with ice cream or chocolate here in the states, in Japan, it is a little bit different (although the ice cream and chocolate mochi are still available there and immensely popular.)





Mochi were typically made at the beginning of the year as part of New Year's festival celebrations, and, while the exact origin is uncertain, have been mentioned in historic documents as early as 1070. (Asian Art Museum) The process to making mochi dumplings, or mochitsuki (which means, "full moon"), for the full name, is fairly laborious:

"Traditionally, glutinous rice is washed and soaked overnight on the evening before the pounding. The next morning the rice is steamed and placed in the usu (large mortar) where it is pounded with a kine (wooden mallet). Once the mass is soft and smooth, it is pulled into various sizes and shapes." (Asian Art Museum)

To celebrate the new year, these little cakes were offered to the kani (deities) and were known as kagami-mochi (mirror mochi) in that setting- they were served with a little slice of bitter orange and were considered lucky for the New Year! (Asian Art Museum)

Today, mochi are typically served as desserts or sweet snacks, and can be served with either ice cream, pastry fillings, such as a chocolate or strawberry cream, or they can be filled with the traditional red bean paste.

Link: http://education.asianart.org/explore-resources/background-information/new-years-japan-mochi-pounding