Bread from the Japanese Bakery

   I've made no secret of my love for vegetables, but a girl doesn't live on verdure alone. May I introduce my favorite neighborhood bakery?

   Mont-Thabor, a few blocks up from the Azabu-Juban station, sells baguettes and pain de campagne, but I've never tried those and they are really beside the point - you can go to one of the very good French bakeries nearby if you're after crunch and bite. The main attraction of Mont-Thabor is its selection of classical Japanese bakery treats, from an-pan to camembert-filled walnut rolls. Their number one best selling bread, which deserves its own post (and will get it, don't worry!), is the spiralled miruku-pan, or milk bread. But let's start with the basics of Japanese bread: shyoku-pan, or table bread.

   Japan may not have an international reputation for its bread, but shyoku-pan should get its own category in the roster of world carbohydrate delights. Soft, squishy, and almost without crumbs, it has a texture that manages to be both light and spongy at the same time. It's like an idealized vision of Wonderbread -- the delightful squashability is the same, but Japanese shyoku-pan has the sweet taste of cream, a sturdier structure, and at Mont-Thabor at least, no weird additives, just flour, milk or cream, yeast, sugar, and maybe eggs. This is bread that will actually go stale in two days and mold in three.

   Check out how thickly Japanese bread is sliced. This is actually the thinnest option available -- the bakery sells pre-cut half loaves sliced into three, four, or five pieces, and this is one of five. You can ask them to slice it thinner, into "sandwich-use" size, but as I know from experience, that's a waste of bread. Japanese bread is made to be toasted, which crisps up the outside while preserving that incredible interior, pillowy-soft enough to make the Downy bear sigh. If you slice it any thinner than this, the toast will be dry as Melba.

   Aren't these loaves gorgeous? If you can see them through the reflected traffic cones, that is. These are the the "Mochiri-Danish" type. The slice of toast above is "Mont-Thabor Classic." There are other options as well, like "Whip-Rich" and "Fuwa-Fuwa" (an onamotopeia for softness). They occasionally have a minimally-whole-wheat loaf, which is a little denser but just as soft as the white ones. You can buy a whole loaf, unsliced, or you can get it sliced. It comes hot out of the oven a couple of times a day, and short of baking it yourself, there's nothing quite as satisfying as taking home a warm bag of yaki-tate, just-baked, soft, creamy bread.

Beautiful Eggplants

  This is what the roasted part of my lunch for the week looks like. On the left we have the green peppers called piman, which are bitter and still crunchy since I only cook them for 10 minutes, and on the right are the baby eggplants.
  Asian eggplants sold in the US all tend to be of one variety: about a foot long and a couple of inches in diameter. Here, however, there are countless variations, and almost none are anywhere near that big. The most common Japanese eggplant seems to be the knob-shaped one, about the length of my hand, but there are also perfectly round ones, ranging from the size of a softball down to about pool-ball size. These are fantastic, and seem to be used primarily, as the vehicle for the sweetened salty-miso dengaku preparation: the eggplants are sliced into thick wheels, fried until saturated with oil, painted with the sauce, and charcoal-grilled. Dengaku anything (it can also be made with tofu or the raw wheat gluten preparation known as namafu) is one of the things I order every time I see it on a menu, without exception.

  Back to my eggplants. These were on the small and bulbous side - the perspective is a bit foreshortened in the photo, but you can see that the one next to the knife is only about half as long as the blade. Some eggplants have spikes on their little leaf-caps, but these were tender and made no fuss about being decapitated. I roasted them tossed with olive oil and salt for 30 minutes at the highest setting on my little convection oven, which is 220 degrees Celsius, and the only temperature I seem to use for anything. One nice thing about Asian eggplants is that they seem to be bitter far less frequently than the giant Western kind. These were almost sweet. Thanks to the alchemy that happens between eggplants and oil, they turned out melty-in-the-mouth, though not melty-on-the-serving-spoon -- in other words, perfect.

Bento Lunch

Every weekend, I try to cook enough vegetables to take my lunch to work every day. Most often, I just do two big batches and have the same two things every day. That might bother some people, but I don't tend to get bored with food I like. I once ate the exact same thing every night in a row for about two months. So a week of the same lunch is nothing.

Besides the vegetables, I always take some of that yummy Japanese brown rice and an individually-packed block of silken tofu (something else that just ain't the same in America). I feel bad about all the unnecessary waste of individual packaging, but some things are just too convenient to be virtuously eschewed, especially since my bento boxes aren't quite big enough to fit a protein along with vegetables in that bottom compartment. 

I usually do my two veggie dishes in different cooking methods, one boiled and one roasted. The carrots here are cooked in a tiny amount of salt water on medium-low until the water was all gone and the bottoms got a bit caramelized, and I tossed in two slivered hot dried red peppers (for four carrots) a couple of minutes before the end. They are crazy spicy carrots and I'm addicted - I've made them the past three or four weeks now. The cauliflower and green peppers were tossed in olive oil and salt and roasted in my convection oven, the cauliflower for 30 minutes and the peppers tossed in 10 minutes before the end. Last week I roasted green beans, and before that it was Japanese eggplants (the tiny kind) with red sweet peppers roasted with miso. This week I didn't have enough cauliflower to last more than three meals, so for the other two days I just took leftovers from another night's dinner - cucumbers cooked in soy sauce with orange and green peppers, okra, and more of those spicy little hot dried peppers. Mild, wet tofu becomes an indispensable party to a lunch of that and my carrots.

Is any meal complete without dessert? This is Amadei's 66% chocolate, the last of the stash I had to pay overweight baggage fees to transport home from Italy (it wasn't ALL chocolate, though, I promise!). I have a handful of almonds and walnuts, then a couple of squares of this. Some time I'm going to do a whole post about chocolate, because I've been a little obsessive about sampling as many as possible and trying to become a chocolate snob. Amadei gets my all-time second best rating. It's complex-flavored and the bite is perfect - good resistance to the teeth, and a clean snap when it finally yields. But my heart didn't flip-flop with the first taste, and that's why I give Domori the edge. But more on that later ...

Breakfasts

In the college dining hall, I often drew curious stares and comments for my unorthodox applications of yogurt. Plain, unsweetened, creamy, white yogurt can be an unassuming hero, especially in places like dining halls where there is very little available that couldn't use a little moistening and tartening up. Back then I spread it on untoasted bread (the flabby, nominally whole-wheat kind supplied by Sysco), added it to the plain marinara sauce they offered for pasta, and mixed it with cottage cheese to lob on top of my salads. Later, I started putting it on my cereal instead of milk, which for some reason seemed a lot less weird to the unimaginative critics of my other creations. But I have a feeling that my current breakfast of choice would raise a few eyebrows, however similar it may be to the classic in its foundations.

No, it's not oatmeal you see there. It's brown rice, the Japanese koshihikari genmai that surpasses the long-grain brown rice sold cheap in America and exceeds it proportinately in price as well. Of course, compared to buying a box of cereal (especially here, where it's foreign and therefore sold at a premium), at about $7 for a kilogram, it's still a deal. It takes me about 2 weeks to go through a 2 kilo bag, eating rice two or three times a day.

I cook 6 servings at a time in my indispensable rice cooker and heat up the leftovers in the microwave as needed (no doubt consuming radiation and poisonous plastics at the same time but what can you do?). For breakfast, I put about 100 grams (4 spoonfuls) of yogurt on top, add fruit (or even veggies), and stir. If the rice is hot enough, the fruit cooks a little and releases more sweetness. It's hard to pick a favorite - I've used the strawberries and bananas pictured here, but peaches are divine and blueberries, apricots, figs, plums, and probably anything slightly squishy would work. In winter I did the same thing using cooked carrots and cabbage I had leftover in the fridge, and it made an extremely fortifying cold-weather breakfast. But summer is all about buying way too many overripe fruit from my neighborhood produce stand, and desperately trying to eat it all up before it goes bad. This breakfast is the perfect solution.

Tako-Yaki at Azabu Matsuri

Summer in Japan means street festivals. This weekend my whole neighborhood was closed to traffic and the streets were lined with temporary food stalls. Starting in the afternoon, the festival-goers began to arrive, and by evening there was a solid crush of people, many in the colorful cotton summer kimono called yukata and nearly all of them balancing plastic cups of beer in one hand and a tray of fried noodles or skewered meat in the other. 

There are so many delicacies found only at festival food stalls. From the fried pancakes made of egg batter, pickles, cabbage, and bacon called okonomi-yaki ("whatever-you-like grill")

to the teeth-aching anzu-ame, an unripe, sour, pickled apricot dipped in a viscous syrup that makes a semi-solid coating of pure sweetness, to the whole fish with heads, fins, and guts intact roasted on a stick, there are plenty of things you would never get in any Japanese restaurant in America, or in most Japanese restaurants in Japan for that matter. 

One of the characteristic cooking methods at a street stall is the hotplate with indentions that mold the thing being cooked. The most famous are probably the ones shaped like a fish, complete with scales, which are usually filled with sweet red bean paste or occasionally custard. There are also a variety of foods cooked in round molds, both sweet and savory. The sweet tends to be a plain or filled pound cake called "baby castella" for some reason. It can also be shaped like a doll, castle, or the cartoon character Doraemon, as if kids needed any extra appeal to be convinced to eat cake. The savory version is like a condensed okonomi-yaki: an eggy batter with tasty additions like octopus tentacles, quail eggs, or cheese. 

The photos here show an extra-special, large-scale, festival-worthy version of tako-yaki, which are usually about the size of a golf ball but in this case were bordering on tennis ball size. They usually have chopped up bits of octopus providing some bite to the otherwise plain batter, and can be topped with a sweet soy-based sauce, mayonnaise, powdered nori seaweed, shaved dried bonito flakes, or any combination thereof. The tako-yaki we saw being made here, though, didn't just have little chunks of octopus in them - each ball contained an entire baby octopus. The guy who was cooking them seemed to be having a bit of trouble keeping all those legs inside the balls as he turned them over. 

The baby octopi were also available grilled on a stick, which is the favored method of serving street food from a stall. Other grilled on a stick options included periwinkles, scallops, squid (legs only or whole body), corn on the cob, chicken hearts and livers, beef tongue and sweetbreads, squares of pork belly, footlong frankfurters, raw cucumbers, and the aforementioned whole-body fish and sweet-sour apricots, and also the chocolate-and-sprinkle coated bananas and tornado potatoes. Suffice it to say that there are many opportunities to practice eating off a stick without the rest of the food falling off.

My Favorite Salad

Weekend lunches at home require as little cooking as possible in the hot summer months. When I was in Italy, I bought a few kilos of dried beans, and I've been cooking big batches of them about twice a month. They're at their best fresh out of the pot, but they last a long time in the fridge and are still tastier than their canned incarnation. I just ate up the last of my chickpeas today. Above, you see them featured on the top of a version of the salad I make every weekend for lunch. This particular salad has baby spinach leaves as its base, but I've also used iceberg, romaine, and butter lettuce. In the middle is some brown rice, and layered in rings around the middle are sliced red bell pepper (or the Japanese version, which is much thinner of flesh and skin but similar in flavor), cucumber (again, the Japanese version - skinny, seedless, and almost sweet in its juicy crispness), avocado (usually I buy the cheapo bruised ones, but the one in the picture is a 200 yen beauty, buttery and without blemish), and the Italian ceci sprinkled on top, along with black pepper and gomashio, a mixture of black sesame seeds and course salt. I've never been one for salad dressings, and with the salt and the oily avocado this salad really doesn't need one at all. At least that's my opinion. I add halved cherry tomatoes sometimes, too. This salad is so delicious that I look forward to it almost as much as to the weekend itself. It's the avocado that has me hooked, to be honest. But the avocado needs all the crispy vegetables to balance it out, and the whole salad needs the rice and beans if it's going to fill me up. There's not a lot worse than the standard veggies-only salad that you can chew and chew without ever getting full, like a forsaken soul in the Hades of Greek mythology. I am happy to say that is not the case with the lovely salad featured here. Cool as a cucumber, but satisfying as unctuous avocado and a complete vegetarian protein can possibly be, this is the summer salad for me.

Roses

I don't actually eat roses, unless they're made of sugar and butter and on top of a cake. (The pieces of cake with the most roses definitely taste better.) But these roses are so beautiful that I had to give them a blog entry of their own. Their connection to food, other than bearing a similarity to cake decoration, is tenuous at best. But aren't they pretty?

Welcome to Oishiness

You can't turn on the television here in Japan without watching some famous actor, singer, or comedian take a bite out of something scrumptious-looking, pause in a moment of dramatic consideration, and then gasp and shout, "OISHII!!!" Literally the word oishii means something like "tasty" but it's used with much greater frequency and with a primal connotation that makes it closer to "mm mm good." 

This blog is about all things oishii - the foods I encounter in Tokyo and wherever else I wander in the world. I baked the cupcakes shown in the photo at the top about one year ago for my going-away-from-Nashville party. Here in Tokyo, my kitchen is literally on the countertop above my washer-dryer in the entrance hall, and I have to confess I have not attempted to make any cupcakes here. To tell the truth, it's not just the size of my kitchen holding me back, but many other factors as well. For one thing, my boyfriend and all his cupcake-monster friends are still in Nashville and not available to help me polish them off. For another, there are enough bakery windows full of tempting, gorgeous pastries here in Tokyo that no one even has to own an oven (and as a matter of fact, there is no built-in oven in probably 99% of the apartments here - you have to buy a combo microwave and convection oven if you have the urge to bake at home).

However, there are plenty of things I do cook at home - dinner for one every night, to start with. And when someday I move back to the USA, land of ovens and opportunities for home-baked oishiness, there will be plenty more cupcakes where these came from.