French Pastries from Paul Bakery

     The Japanese fascination with all things French runs so deep that occasionally it even makes international news - I remember reading an article a few years ago about the phenomenon of young Japanese women being diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder after trips to Paris that shattered their fairy-tale images by exposure to Gallic discourtesy.  On a more mundane level, you can't walk a block in some parts of Tokyo without encountering endless outposts of Parisian chocolate shops, patisseries, bakeries, and, yes, tea houses.
     Paul Bakery is a chain, maybe the French version of Panera, which has expanded to England, Belgium, and Morocco, as well as China, Turkey, and Dubai.  Apparently Florida was the only US state they saw as a worthy market.  They have a number of shops in Tokyo, including one on the first floor of my office building, and if I don't pack my lunch to bring then chances are that I'll get either their Camembert or their tuna sandwich.
     I know, chains are evil.  But the thing about Paul is, it actually tastes as good as the small, independent bakeries in my neighborhood.  The bread doesn't taste like it was all mixed up in a centralized production warehouse and has been in shipment, frozen, for a week.  Maybe that's how it's actually produced, I don't know.  Maybe it's just the seductive European cache of its being a French chain.  But the fact is, the baguettes are crisp and chewy, the pastries are crumbly and not-too-sweet, and I only start to feel ashamed of going there if it happens more than twice a week.

      Besides breads, sandwiches, and croissants, they also have a pastry case filled with tarts, eclairs, and the choux a la creme at the top of this post.  The "shoe cream," as Japanese pronunciation usually renders it, is wildly popular here and there are endless variations on it - flaky versus classic choux pastry, filled versus sandwiched, flavored fillings ranging from chocolate to candied chestnut to gorgonzola, even chocolate-dipped (overkill, but heavenly).  The Paul incarnation is noteworthy for its layering of custard cream in the bottom half of the eggy, chewy pate a choux sandwich, topping it with a swirl of barely sweetened whipped cream, and dusting the top of the whole thing with powdered sugar.  I was intending to get one of these to celebrate my birthday, but they were all sold out that day.  I ended up getting two cannelles instead, since they're my second favorite sweet thing.

    The cannelle (that final e should have an accent aigu but I don't know how to type that) is something I had never even heard of until about a year ago, shortly after I first moved to Tokyo.  I didn't like it at first - the outside is so dark and crunchy that it almost felt like eating a cake that had been burned by accident.  The inside is so custardy, eggy and flecked with vanilla, that it's practically like eating cake batter.  The combination is surprising, and it wasn't until my second cannelle, several months later, that I became obsessed.  I did some research, found recipes and copper cannelle molds online, and will be prepared to start baking as soon as I move back to a country where they aren't readily available on the first floor of my office building.
      

Salmon Dinner at Home

     After going out to eat so much the first couple of days Yuri was here, I started to feel vegetable-deprived, as well as a little poor, so I decided it was time to have a home cooked meal. Yuri was at the Oedo Monogatari Onsen, the Edo-period themed baths on Odaiba, until late that evening (it's a good 45 minutes from my apartment), so I had plenty of time after work to shop, chop, and grill. Cooking for myself alone isn't much of an inspiration, so it was fun having an excuse to get creative for a change.  

     This salad was inspired by one we had ordered the night before at an izakaya, which was criss-crossed with not just mayo, but green mayo (it was flavored with nori seaweed).  Not having such mad mayo-coloring skills myself, I just sprinkled my messy checkerboard with sesame seeds. The vegetables underneath are steamed grean beans and okra, and raw cherry tomatoes, red peppers, and cucumbers. Japanese mayonnaise is a little sweeter than American and always comes in a fun squeeze bottle, perfect for making the designs ubiquitous to Japanese mayo use. After all, you couldn't have a potato-corn-and-octopus pizza without a criss-crossing of mayonnaise, now, could you? Just kidding, I've never seen octopus on a potato and corn pizza. Usually it's raw bacon.

     For the main course, I did foil-steamed salmon. My microwave-convection oven actually has a foil-mushi setting just for fish, so I don't even know how long or at what temperature this cooked. I think it took about 15 minutes. I first cooked the mushrooms, a mixture of enoki and nameko, in a little water and soy sauce until they were soft and salty. Then I put the raw king salmon fillets, each about 100 grams, on top of the mushrooms on its own length of foil. I sprinkled a little more soy sauce and sake (white wine would also work) on top and folded up the packages. They came out perfectly, moist and juicy. I love that foil-mushi function!

     In restaurants, rice is usually listed last on the menu, and it's usually ordered last, so I served my rice course separately in the Japanese style. It's almost never plain, but is either made into a rice ball (onigiri), stuffed with fish or a pickled plum, and maybe grilled, or else cooked with broth and eggs to make a porridge (zousui), or else served with a little kettle of tea to pour over and the same toppings that would be stuffed inside onigiri to sprinkle on top, which turns it into ochatzuke. My rice was an autumnal specialty, rice steamed with chunks of the purple-and-yellow Japanese sweet potatoes and sprinkled with black sesame seeds. The salmon roe on top was my own flourish, because I love it and wanted to splurge a little for Yuri. It went really well with the sweet potatoes - the contrasting textures and balanced sweetness and saltiness were a nice combination.

     The tarts in the photo at the top were the only part of the meal I didn't make myself - I brought them home from the newest little patisserie on the block. It's right up the street from me and just opened in July, and it's in such an out-of-the-way location that I don't know how they can stay in business. I got their macarons once, and they were a bit sweet for my taste. But these tarts were perfect. Both had a normal tart-pastry shell, but the one on the left had a citrus-custard filling and was topped with peeled grapes, peaches, and candied orange peel. The one on the left was filled with a chestnut frangipane and topped with peeled figs, candied chestnuts, and chocolate shavings. Yuri was falling asleep (jet lag and carbohydrates, fatal combination!) and is never much of a dessert eater, so I got to eat more than my share of both of them. Not that I'm complaining. 

Daifuku Mochi

     It's hard to express the deliciousness of traditional Japanese sweets. Red bean paste inside a dumpling of gooey, chewy sticky-rice dough doesn't appeal to everyone, but those of us who love it can get pretty obsessive about them. Daifuku mochi, as the plain white-rice, red-bean variety are called (the name means sticky big luck), are sold in the preservative-packed, 100-yen incarnation in every convenience store, and big gift boxes full of sweets with an even longer shelf life are ubiquitous in stations and around other touristy spots. These are fine, but they don't have the exquisite flavor and texture of fresh.

     Asanoya is a mochi shop in Akasaka where the mochi are made fresh every morning and will start to get stiff and crusty within 24 hours. The specialty, on the far left and pictured above, is mame-daifuku. Mame (pronouned mah-meh) means bean, and there are salty-sweet candied red beans sunk in the rice dough, a pleasant textural and flavor contrast to the chunky sweet bean paste inside. Next in the lineup are sakura mochi, a pink-tinted square of thinly rolled dough rolled in a cylinder around red bean paste and topped with a pickled cherry-tree leaf. Third in line are kusa-mochi, the rice dough flavored with the herb yomogi, which turns it green and gives it a delicious grassy flavor. The red bean paste in these is the smooth kind, my favorite. Last are ohagi, which are an inside-out version of daifuku - rice inside, red bean paste outside. They're kind of hard to eat - you need a fork - so they're not my favorite even though I love red bean paste and the idea of having it in the larger proportion is a great one in theory.

     The only other thing they sell in this tiny shop is kushi-dango, unfilled rice-flour balls skewered on a wooded stick and grilled, then doused with a salty-sweet sauce of soy and brown sugar. The first time we went to the shop, these were selling out before our eyes as we waited in line at the window, and the little old grandma behind us kept darting to one side and the other, keeping an eye on the dango and becoming ever more agitated as the lady in front of us bought all but one. We only were after mame-daifuku that day, so the grandma got her dango, but the next time we made a special trip a little earlier in the day to get a stick of dango for ourselves. The shop opens early in the morning and is supposed to close at 7 pm, but I've heard they usually sell out long before that.

Asanoya

Tokyo, Minato-ku

Akasaka 2-10-4

Authentic Burger

     If you're ever craving a good old-fashioned authentic burger in Tokyo, you can't do much better than Authentic Burger, a tiny triangle-shaped restaurant at the top of a hill in the Akasaka neighborhood. This restaurant is hugely popular with everyone at my office, Japanese and American alike, and for good reason. See the height of that sandwich? See the shiny egg-glazed bun? See the folds of fresh iceberg lettuce, the fanned out slices of avocado, and the Proustian square of plastic cheese, so evocative of those childhood days when the most that could be asked of us in the food prep department was peeling off the film wrapper and breaking the cheese into saltine-sized squares? See the lunchroom-standard red squeeze bottle of ketchup and the crispy outside, pillowy inside, McDonald's look-alike French fries? Who could ask for anything more?

     Though I've only ever had the fillet o'fish, and therefore can't vouch for the flavor of the meat in the hamburgers, to judge from the shop's popularity with my co-workers and the consistently high quality of everything else, that any of the variations on the burger on their menu (I believe there are five or six) would be a safe bet. As for the fish, it's the perfect combination of crispy breading, not too oily, and flaky white inside, not at all smelly. All burgers come with fries, and you can choose add-ons, such as the cheese and avocado, for an extra one or two hundred yen each. The lunch set comes with your choice of beverage. We both ordered iced tea, and what we got was not just your average iced tea, but iced earl gray, with liquid sugar on the side. On the other side of the menu there are sandwiches, and I'm sure they're delicious, but why would you get a sandwich when the name of the restaurant has the word burger in it?

     Yes, these burgers are so big and juicy, so dripping with mayo and tomato juice and chunks of avocado slipping out the sides, that they come with a paper pouch to control the damage. I tried to eat the burger without using the pouch the first time I came here. That was unwise. Substantial as the brioche-like bun may be, it's just not big enough to contain everything inside, and as it says in the instructions, you don't want to waste any of those juices. You also don't want the juices running down your arms or splashing onto your lap. Besides, reading the bag-use instructions will make you laugh and get your lunch off to a great start even before the food arrives.

      Before leaving, take a few minutes to look around the restaurant. It's filled with retro knicknacks and artwork, and makes you long for those bygone days when every hamburger stand made authentic burgers as delicious as these.

Umai Sushi Kan

     A few months ago, I had to go on a series of business trips to Sendai, which is a mid-sized city a few hours north of Tokyo by bullet train. It seems like every town in Japan has its own famous food, and in Sendai the local specialty is cow tongue prepared in a million different ways: grilled, stewed, curried, in salad, on rice. Fortunately for me, the other local specialty is fish from the nearby Pacific. Our clients took us to lunch at the same tongue restaurant each time we visited them, and we always went to dinner at the same sushi shop, Umai Sushikan. It had a huge menu, but unlike many chain restaurants the fish was wonderful - fresh, creatively and carefully prepared, and cut into generous portions. Yuri and I went to their Ginza branch for lunch last Tuesday, and it was just as good as I remembered it being in Sendai.

    This is a tuna sample, which gives you a good idea of how much fish they give you. The little ball of rice underneath is only about half as big as the sashimi on top. From left to right, there's akami, or ordinary red-meat tuna, o-toro, or super fatty tuna, and chu-toro, or medium-fatty tuna. The more fat, obviously, the more buttery it tastes, but even akami is melt-in-your-mouth tender. There was really no comparison to the fish we had gotten at the supermarket the night before, as good as that was.
    The photo at the top of the post is salmon wrapped around salmon roe on rice. It's called oyako gunkan, or parent-and-child roll. This is something you don't see that often even in Japan, but it ought to be a classic - it's hard to top the combination of smooth, sweet salmon and the bursting-bubbles texture of the salty little eggs.

 

Here's an example of the sushi chef's creativity. The fish is kodama, a small blue-fleshed fish similar to sardines, with the same rich, briny flavor. Braiding it doesn't change the taste, but gives it flair and sets off the pretty leopard-spot pattern of its skin.

     

     Last, a delicious example of the native spicy tuna roll. No mayo or hot peppers, just tuna ground to a smooth pulp paired with crunchy green onions - a perfect contrast of colors, textures, and flavors.

     We ate many more pieces of sushi besides these. In Japanese sushi bars, the single pieces (nigiri-sushi) are more prevalent than rolls (maki-sushi), and the spicy tuna was the only roll we ordered. But it's easy to go overboard with nigiri - each fish is so different and so fabulous that I always try to taste them all. But fortunately, having already been to the Sendai branch twice before, I had narrowed it down to my favorites. The three tunas, the salmon-ikura combination, the best of the blue fish - mackerel, horse mackerel, kodama, sanma - and the seared fatty salmon, plus one spicy mentaiko (the tiny fish eggs sprinkled all over American sushi) for Yuri, and we were stuffed. So stuffed, in fact, that we didn't even bother to have dinner, just a shared berry parfait at an internet cafe and a couple of beers at karaoke later that night. 

I Love Coffee, I Love Tea

     The Espressamente cafe in Nihonbashi is one of the places I keep going back to, and of course I had to take Yuri there since he loves espresso. It's run by Illy, and obviously serves Illy coffee, which means it's far superior to anything I could make at home or get at Starbucks (or as it's called here, in a very Japanese and very cute abbreviation, Sutaba. Similarly, Banana Republic is BanaRipa).
     The cafe is very modern and bright, with red-orange bars and tables, lots of spotlighting, and bottles of Campari alternating with miniature cacti as decoration all down the central communal-seating area. There are little individual tables along the wall and a glass-enclosed smoking area. They have not only coffee and cakes but also a variety of sandwiches and lunch sets - a Japanese touch in what otherwise feels like it could almost be an Italian cafe. There are even real Italians working behind the counter sometimes. I like to go there for a caffeine boost before the workout of shopping for china in Takashimaya next door.
     After Yuri and I had looked at china and had lunch, we continued to the next spot on our drinks tour, the Mariage Freres tea store in Ginza. They sell tea loose from gigantic black metal canisters - there must be a hundred - stacked ceiling high on wooden shelves that make it look like the hold of a ship just back from the East Indies. The clerks will haul the canisters down and let you smell the teas to compare them, and you become so intoxicated by the scents and the names (like Rose of the Himalayas, Marco Polo, and French Blue Earl Grey) that it's inevitable that you will purchase several of their black metal cans, miniatures of the big canisters, complete with logo.

     If you need to rest afterwards, or if you'd rather taste before buying, they have a cafe on the second and third floors where a teapot containing four or five kinds of tea is about nine dollars. Yuri got a Georgian tea in hopes of experiencing a Proustian revisit to his childhood in the Motherland. It was very smoky flavored, delicious with sugar, but didn't take him quite back. I had a Tibetan tea, described as tasting of ripe fruit in the book of teas they give you to assist you in ordering. It was indeed very fruity. The thing that amazes me about all the Mariage Freres teas I've tasted is their complete lack of bitterness, with or without sugar. That and the incredible variety. I can only imagine the training those clerks must undergo to learn the subtle differences between all those hundreds of black canisters!

Supermarket Sushi

     To be completely accurate, the picture above shows not sushi but sashimi - the word sushi refers to the rice, not the fish. Whatever you call it, having it available pre-sliced in individual-serving-sized packs at every supermarket, for about half (or less) what you'd pay at a restaurant, is one of those things that really makes me appreciate living in Japan. I don't even buy it that often (I can't stand the fishy smell that lingers in my drain after washing out the plastic trays for recycling), but knowing it's there is somehow very cheering. It may not be the highest quality sashimi out there, it's as good as any I've ever had in the US and you can't beat the convenience and the price.
     We had already started eating before I remembered to pull out my camera, so the trays you see here are missing a slice or two. On the left is medium-fatty tuna, meaty in flavor and buttery in texture. The top right is katsuo, which is bonito in English although it's not a fish I've seen much on western menus. It's usually served as it is here, slightly seared on the edges, which gives a smoky flavor to what would otherwise be a taste much like tuna. On the lower right is kampachi, which is amberjack, a type of yellowtail. I had to look that up online just now - there are so many more words in Japanese to distinguish types of fish we call all under one name in English. Probably all three of these fish would be called "tuna" in American!

     The occasion of the supermarket sashimi feast was Yuri's first night in Tokyo. I took this picture from the bus on the way to meet him at the airport. Unfortunately for him, he barely even remembers eating dinner that night, he was so jet lagged. However, I was happy to use the occasion to sample all the oishii mono (delicious things) I wouldn't normally indulge in, especially in the space of a single week! We had lots of fun and took lots of pictures, which will be appearing here over the next several days.
     To go with the sashimi, I made a simple salad of cucumber and avocado and steamed some okra. We also had brown rice topped with the peppery little flowers that came with the tuna and figs and nectarines for dessert. But the fish stole the show. Then and there we made a vow to eat as much sushi as we could during his week there ...

Nutella

   Nutella isn't exactly common in Japan, but it certainly is a perfect match for Japanese bread. The combination is so rich and sweet that it's practically like eating cake. I brought my Nutella back from Italy because I had heard that the Italian-made kind tastes different than what we get in America, but unfortunately I'm not discriminating enough to tell the difference. Italian Nutella is definitely very sweet, so sweet that it hurts my teeth, and I would have thought that if the European recipe changed anything from the American one it would have been to tone down the sugar. Living abroad, I really have noticed my sense of sweetness changing - I remember being shocked when a Japanese lady sitting next to me on my very first flight to Japan gave me the pack of Oreos that came with our meals and told me she didn't like American cookies, but now I feel the same way. Japanese cookies are definitely sweet, but not quite as aggressive about it, and they usually feel more balanced between the sugar and the butter.
   This may be heresy to Nutella lovers, but I really think I like peanut butter better. So much for imagining that I have superior tastes to those Oreo-loving compatriots of mine. Europeans, Japanese, and probably the rest of the world looks down on peanut butter but I went through three big bottles in the past three months and fully exhausted my supply. They do sell it here, but being imported it's ridiculously expensive. And Yuri will be here next week, bringing me two more bottles ... thank goodness! Meanwhile, I'm forced to eat Nutella. What a tough life!

Summer Supper

   Zucchini is so abundant in the US that there are jokes about people leaving bags of them on their neighbor's porches. There are recipes for using zucchini in everything from cake to meatloaf. Apparently it's the kind of easy-to-grow vegetable that will take over a garden patch and leave the gardener wishing that he had never heard of zucchini.
   Apparently that's not a problem they have here in Japan. Either they've discovered a way to keep supply low, or the zucchini jokes have failed to penetrate the Tokyo metropolitan area. Maybe it's the Italian name, exotic enough to veil its secret profligacy. Whatever the reason, this vegetable that costs about a dollar a pound in the southern US costs a dollar per not-especially-large zucchini here in Tokyo.
   Having grown up eating yellow squash (which they call yellow zucchini in Japanese) and green zucchini all summer, I missed it so much that I eventually started forking over the yen. How could I go a whole summer without summer squash? Since it's worth its weight in gold, though, I never cook it just by itself, but use just part of a zucchini at a time and mix it up with other, less expensive vegetables.
   The trick to cooking a big mixup of watery summer vegetables without having them turn to tasteless, colorless mush is speed, heat, and adding them one at a time according to how long it takes them to cook. Here, the shiitake mushrooms went in first into a pot with just enough water mixed with soy sauce to film over the bottom. The zucchini was next, then the yellow peppers, and the cherry tomatoes just a couple of seconds before turning off the heat. To prevent burning, and to check for impending mushiness, you have to stand right there and stir often, but since the whole dish cooks in about five minutes, that's no great sacrifice.