My Brother's Awesome Pizza

My little brother and I never had a lot in common growing up. I loved reading, drama, and drawing, and he played sports and guitar. But at some point we both got hooked on cooking. Years ago, when he was just getting started, he asked me to show him how to make dough for pizza. I remember being amazed by how much more quickly he could knead than I can (he's probably six foot five, and has proportionately giant hands). Now he's surpassed his old teacher in pizza skills. About an hour after I got home from the airport, he was finishing up the kneading of a batch of his special pizza dough, and by evening it was risen and ready to be turned into a welcome dinner. He made four pizzas for the seven of us, two meat and two veggie.
My brother's pizzas have a luscious, fluffy crust with real flavor of its own thanks to a long rise and the brushing of olive oil and salt he gives the pizzas before they go in the oven. There were 3 cups of flour in each of these pizzas - they were definitely not thin and crispy! So that we could have hot pizza when the time came for seconds, he called us to the table as the first two pizzas were coming out of the oven and the second two were going in. He bakes them with just sauce, meat, and cheese until the crust is set, then adds the chopped vegetables for the final few minutes. The result is completely delicious. Substantial as each piece is, I just couldn't stop myself from having three of the veggie ones, and I wished I had room for more.

Buche de Noel

This is the Yule log cake I made for Christmas dinner. Since it was almost twice as long as my mom's silver cake tray, I just cut the rolled up cake in half and made it into two logs. The recipe is from a Julia Child cookbook, and was a bit more complicated and detailed than I'm used to. For the cake, a browned butter-citrus genoise, I was supposed to beat the eggs (without separating them, which surprised me) with the sugar for 5 minutes while I browned the butter. Unfortunately, the butter took more than 5 minutes to brown, and by the time it had finished cooking and cooling, the eggs had severely deflated. I'm afraid that was the reason the cake remained flat and dense rather than becoming springy in the oven. However, it wasn't a disaster - it still tasted fine, even though the texture was wrong, and it actually rolled up much more easily than the lighter-textured cakes I've made for Buches de Noel past.
The filling and frosting, which I made the day before I made the cake, were a challenge as well, but one in which I was more successful. They're based on Italian meringue, which I'd never tried to make since it involves bringing sugar water to the soft-ball stage and drizzling it into whipped egg whites, a process that seemed to hold way too many opportunities for disaster. However, it actually worked, to my amazement. Without a candy thermometer, I had to stand over the saucepan of bubbling syrup, dribbling drops from the end of a spoon onto a saucer until they seemed to make a ball-like droplet, but I guess I got it right. After adding the sugar, I had to add melted chocolate and butter, then separate into two bowls, one to become filling (with an extra half stick of butter beaten in), the other to become frosting (with a few tablespoons of cocoa added to stiffen it up). I made the mushrooms out of marzipan painted with melted white chocolate and dusted with cocoa. When I had frosted the cake, I made bark designs with the tines of a fork and sifted confectioners' sugar over everything for snow. It looked beautiful, and was a light and sweet finish to a day of feasting.

Japanese New Year

The celebration of the New Year is the most important holiday in Japan. Practically every business closes for at least 3 days, there's a mass exodus from Tokyo as people return to their parents' homes in the countryside or in other cities, and everyone relaxes, toasting mochi (rice cakes) and mikan (tangerines) on the gas heater. Since there are a lot of relatives around and the lady of the house also needs a chance to relax, the traditional meal for New Year's Day consists almost entirely of preserved foods beautifully arranged in stacked lacquer boxes, called o-sechi ryori.
Of course, there are many women who pride themselves on cooking everything themselves, and serving it up on the beautiful lacquer trays and in the boxes and dishes on display in all the department stores this time of year. But there is also the option of ordering your o-sechi, to be delivered New Year's Eve, from a department store, supermarket, or even convenience store (naturally, these vary greatly in price). Every store offers a catalogue describing and picturing the options, and at Mitsukoshi, where I took these photos, there's even a whole area of one floor devoted to displaying plastic models of each available set, so you can see exactly what you're ordering in full color and life size.
Whole shrimp (and in the more expensive boxes, whole lobsters or crabs), with heads and legs attached, are usually the first thing to catch my eye in these boxes. I'm assuming they are an exception to the rule that the foods in the box can be prepared ahead and will keep over several days. Pickled fish eggs, both the red salmon roe and the yellow herring roe, which is crunchy and comes in a wedge of eggs all stuck together, are always present, but there's never sashimi - the fish is either salted, smoked, or pickled in soy sauce, or it's made into the rubbery pink-and-white kamaboko you can see at top right in the upper box in the photo below.
Many of the foods have symbolic meaning - red and white are the colors of good luck, for example, thus the colored kamaboko, the prominence of shrimp and carrots (a special, dark-orange carrot from Kyoto, cut into flower shapes, of course), bite-size turnip-and-crab rolls, and other red and white foods. The herring roe is symbolic of good fortune, since yellow is the color of money and the number of eggs in each wedge is too numerous to be counted. The black, candied beans are also a good-luck symbol, though I'm not sure why. They're cooked for 12 or more hours in a syrupy broth of sugar and soy sauce, and they come out so incredibly rich that one or two is all you can eat. Each of these boxes, by the way, serves 2-4 people and costs 2-300 dollars. The most fancy boxes can cost much more. Last year I ordered a small box (about 100 dollars) when Yuri came to visit, and while it was fun to eat such beautiful food, I felt like everything tasted the same - very sweet. It's interesting how many cultures share the same principle of ushering in a sweet new year by eating lots of sugar. Not that I'm complaining!

Christmas in Tokyo

This time of year, Japan is all decked out with lights, wreaths, and Christmas trees. Yes, it's a Buddhist/Shinto country where Christian missionaries never had much success, but it's also the second largest economy in the world, and the commercial side of Christmas has caught on in a big way.
Interestingly, the "traditions" that most Japanese families have adopted for the holiday include eating Kentucky Fried Chicken and Christmas Cake, which is usually a strawberry shortcake ordered from a bakery, department store, or supermarket. As you can see in the brochure above, there are other options - notably, the ever-popular Mont Blanc transformed into a multi-serving-sized cake - but strawberries are classic. Even the supermarket produce section has strawberries on special right now, presumably because some enterprising housewives will make their own.
It's not just pastry shops that get into the holiday spirit. This is the display in the front window of Mame-Gen, the old-fashioned bean-snack shop near Azabu Juban station. There are similar displays all over the neighborhood. The 100-yen shop nearby has been blasting Christmas music all day long for about a month now, and has plastic wreaths and tinsel for sale front and center. The florists have bonsai-sized Christmas trees and poinsettias for sale. There are lights strung on trees and buildings everywhere, and today when I was in Ginza I saw a green-suited Santa greeting customers in front of one store. A little Japanese kid seemed confused by the green suit, but wasn't that once traditional in Europe? It made me think of the Ghost of Christmas Present in A Christmas Carol, anyway.
There are tasteful decorations in many parts of town, including the beautiful blue-and-white lights all over Midtown and Roppongi Hills, and the understated rows of triangular trees sparkling with only white lights in Ginza, but Shibuya is not necessarily the place to go looking for high taste. The decorations are big, bright, and campy. It's a teen hangout, and since Christmas is one of the most romantic nights of the year in Japan, second only to Valentine's Day, I'm sure there will be plenty of kids on dates strolling under the crown along "Christmas Lane" next week.

Nuts for Mame-Gen

Mame-Gen is one of the most popular shops in the Azabu Juban area, to judge from the number of people I always see carrying their distinctive green bags around the neighborhood. They sell traditional, old-fashioned snacks, mainly beans and nuts in various flavors. Mame means bean, and Gen means source, and this shop is definitely the place to go if you're looking for a wide range of crunchy, sweet-and-salty treats. In the photo above, the pink labeled package at left contains roasted and sweetened broad beans, the middle one has soybeans in a soy powder and green tea flavored coating, and the package at right has brandied almonds. In back, hard to see, there are brown-sugar-coated peanuts and yogurt-coated beans. And the shops sells about a million other flavors.
Though beans are the specialty here, they also sell a smaller range of rice crackers and sweets such as karinto, the fried, black-sugar-sweetened snack I wrote about in the last post, dried fruit, and hard candy. The fried rice crackers are actually made there in the store (or at least some of them are) and the frying machine is right there in the front window. If your timing is right, you can take home a hot bag of just-fried crackers. Or at least get a sample to taste.
Mame-Gen

Azabu-Juban 1-8-12

Minato-ku, Tokyo

Azabu Karinto

Remember what I said about how lines form outside popular shops? Azabu Karinto, a newcomer to the Azabu Juban neighborhood, is nearly always crowded on the weekends, but I recently made up my mind to brave the crowds and join the line. And having tasted what they sell, I'm now in serious danger of having to go back. Karinto may very possibly become my new obsession.

Karinto come in many flavors and types - over 50 types, according to the picture brochure included with each package. The classic style is that at that top right and bottom left - a yeasted dough that's cut or twisted into small pieces (though they can be as thick as an inch in diameter), fried, and soaked in syrup made from the black, molassesy sugar for which Okinawa is famous. They can either be soft (the one at the top) or crunchy (the one below). Azabu Karinto sells endless variations. Also on this plate are peanut and white chocolate-coated crunchy karinto. Others I'll have to try some day include soy milk, cinnamon, green tea, brown rice, miso, yuzu, and pumpkin... and about 40 others.

In the crispy-type karinto, the syrup soaks pretty much all the way through, but in the larger soft variety, as you can see, the center stays plain. It actually seems as if the center was made separately, but I don't know if that's the case, or how that would be done. But the texture is much firmer than the outer layer. Though karinto itself is not a beautiful food - it's an old-fashioned Okinawan snack that's considered rough and rustic - the packaging at Azabu Karinto makes up for the karinto's lack of beauty. Each package comes in one of four or five different patterns of thick Japanese paper, decorated with calligraphy or old maps or line drawings, and bound with a vertical off-white strip of paper bearing the shop's name and stamp seal and the name of the type of karinto inside. It's like opening a present.

Azabu Karinto

Azabu-Juban 1-7-9

Minato-ku, Tokyo

Happy Chanukah!

You have to love a holiday that demands eating fried foods by candlelight. And you have to love a language that includes a word like "fuwa-fuwa," meaning light and fluffy, and applied equally to fabric softener results and to baked goods. The traditional donut of Chanukah are the jam-filled sufganiyot that probably originated in eastern Europe and are now considered Israeli. In Japan, it's more common to find red bean paste than jelly in a donut, but Le Petit Decorer up the street from me sells plain, unfilled fuwa-fuwa-type donuts - perfect for serving with jam. Actually, you can ask them to be filled with custard cream in the store, a tempting option, though not one I've tried (yet).
Le Petit Decorer only sells donuts on the weekends, and offers three options. The one above is plain "milk" flavor, coated with sugar. The other fuwa-fuwa donut available is coated with cinnamon sugar. The third type is a ring-shaped cake donut flavored with maple syrup and sold with the donut hole sitting on top. I'm not normally crazy about donuts - sure, I like them, but I would rather have something more substantial and, much as I love the word, less fuwa-fuwa. I guess I'll never be a policeman. Still, for the sake of Chanukah, I'm not opposed to a donut or two. Especially by candlelight.

Fruitcake

I am one of those unusual people who actually like fruitcake. Maybe it's because I've never been exposed to a bad one - or maybe it's just that I've never met a fruitcake I considered bad. Dried fruit, candied fruit, nuts, sugar, butter, and a little alcohol - what's not to like? I've never been one to shy away from rich foods, but fruitcake (like its rustic relative, trail mix) is so rich that it's easy to eat too much without even realizing it. So when I opened up the party-favor gift we all received at the end of our office party last week and found a cute little box of two-bite-sized fruitcake slices from West Confectionary, each neatly wrapped in gold foil, I was completely charmed. What a wonderful idea, and what an attractive present! Fortunately the flavor did not disappoint, and the cake tastes just as fruitcake should - dense and rum-raisiny, with just a hint of spice. It's different from the recipe I grew up with, but still evocative of merrie-olde-Englande Christmas pudding and a cozy nostalgia for Dickensian sleet and candlesticks. No humbug.

Holiday Party

They say that back in the old days before the economy tanked, the annual holiday party my office held was a model of decadence, the kind of affair held at a big hotel and involving things like ice sculptures, Champagne, and evening wear. That was all called off by our CEO in an attempt to stay solvent, and last year the holiday party consisted of some hors d'oeuvres in the office board room. This year we went a little more upscale - it was still funded by the partners out of their own pockets, but at least we had a venue, the exclusive Ark Hills Club in the Akasaka-Roppongi Itchome area. The food was a step up from last year, too, except for the desserts. You will notice that - gasp - there isn't even a picture of cake here. That's because there was just one tray of cakes, and it disappeared in about five minutes and was never replenished. All the other food and drink on offer was plentiful and tasty, however, so I can't give the event a terrible score overall.

There was a whole buffet of hot dishes, like the one above, as well as the sandwiches pictured at top and some cold dishes like the smoked salmon and the marinated octopus in the platters at the back of the top picture. The hot foods were all heavily sauced - the only one I sampled was a platter of sea bream pieces in a silky sesame sauce, but there was also a creamy shrimp gratin, a thick, spongy-looking omelet in demiglace, and the pork dish above, which was the prettiest, being decorated with those tasty and shapely shiso leaves.

Even Tokyo Tower gets dressed up for the holidays. This was the view from the Ark Hills Club, which is on the 37th floor and has panoramic windows looking out over the city towards the bay. The lights on the tower (which is an orange monstrosity by day) changed color every few minutes, going from multi to all orange to all blue, etcetera. It was pretty.

After the long table of hot and cold western-style dishes, there was a shorter table on one end of the buffet with a couple of Japanese foods. Literally, a couple: the tempura above and the nigiri-sushi below. Tempura is one of those things that should really be eaten hot, but I must admit that didn't stop me from having four or five pieces. The sprinkle-your-own-salt thing was a big draw. And the sushi was quite tasty, too - a step above the pre-packaged grocery or convenience store quality, though like tempura, it's amazing what a difference freshness makes. On the whole, the food was beautiful, plentiful, and tasty. It was a really nice party, and since I don't have any personal experience of the old days to compare it against, I would even go so far as to call it decadent.

Tokyo Rusk

"Handmade delicious and beautiful rusks comfort our hearts and wrap us in sweet dreams."

That's the slogan to be found printed in cute, cursive handwriting on every bag and package of individually wrapped rusks at one of the newest additions to the Azabu Juban shopping area, Tokyo Rusk. With other branches around the city, and its sleek, transparent store design, with a flat screen TV in the front window playing a silent movie about the making of rusks, it's something of a misfit in this old-fashioned neighborhood - it would be more at home in Shibuya or Ginza. But it seems to be popular, not least with the young children who come in with their parents and quickly begin sampling the broken-up rusks set out in little baskets all around the store.

I decided on Earl Grey not based on taste-testing, but because the Japanese woman shopping there at the same time as I was talking on her cell phone to a husband or mother at home, and kept repeating, "Earl Grey? Earl Grey? Anything else? Just Earl Grey?" So that's what I took home. They have little chunks of orange peel, black dots (tea?), and a visible coating of sugar, though they're not overly sweet. They're quite pleasant, and might be good dipped in a hot cup of Earl Grey, in fact.

Why are rusks so popular in Japan? (My colleagues at work recently gave me a couple of rusks to sample from the most sought-after rusk shop in Japan, Gateau Festa Harada, a place where people stand in line to buy what basically amounts to chocolate-coated melba toast.) They're crunchy, they're usually sweet but not too sweet, and they have a European sort of je-ne-sais-quoi element to them, even for Americanka me. I like them, and they're a nice change from rice crackers, though somewhat similar in sweetness and crunchiness. Maybe that's the secret of their appeal here ... or maybe that's just the result of the ones I've tried being made in Japan.

https://www.tokyorusk.co.jp/

Azabu Juban 2-8-8

Minato-ku, Tokyo

Soyjoy

What is Soyjoy? It's a meal-replacement bar, often marketed to dieters, though it has a fair amount of fat and sugar. But for a snacky sort of food, it's pretty healthy, and for a health food, it's unusually tasty. American meal-replacement bars tend to be exorbitantly high on the protein, thanks to the addition of whey powder and other ingredients you would never find in nature, and pretty low on flavor, for the same reason, no doubt. Or they tend to be exorbitantly high on the sugar, or the no-calorie sweetener, as the case may be. Japanese meal-replacement bars are usually a lot less sweet, a lot less artificial, and also a lot less nutritious - they're more like crackers or digestive biscuits.
Soyjoy is the best of the bunch, because it actually has a bit of protein (about 4 grams per 140-calorie bar), and that protein comes mostly from soybeans. In addition, Soyjoy is stuffed with real pieces of dried fruit and nuts, making it taste almost as good as a granola bar. Because of all the fiber, it's a good idea to drink a lot of water at the same time - that really fills you up. It comes in a variety of attractively packaged flavors - the top photo shows, from top to bottom, apple, prune, raisin, strawberry, apricot, and cocoa-orange, and there are a few others, too. I see from their website that they're sold at a number of drugstores and supermarkets in the US, although in fewer - and different - flavors (including peanut chocolate chip - so American - but it sounds delicious!). I'll have to find out how they compare to the Japanese version when I'm home for the holidays in a few weeks!

December Pastries

When I was teaching English in Kyoto elementary schools, I had a set of flash cards with pictures of food on them to teach the English words for things like cake, cookies, hamburgers, and oranges. Coincidentally - or perhaps not so coincidentally - all four of those words are English loan-words in Japanese, as were almost all the words on the flash cards, making it a favorite unit among the kids (they already knew what the words meant and enjoyed laughing at the strange way that I pronounced them). The illustration on the cake flash card looked almost exactly like the photo above, because that's the quintessential cake in Japan. It's known as Strawberry Shortcake, though the cake is really a sponge, covered in very faintly sweetened cream and filled with slivers of strawberry. Like the Mont Blanc, the Strawberry Shortcake is found in every Japanese pastry shop you will ever see, and was always the number one favorite when I asked my students what kind of cake they liked. (Incidentally, chocolate cake in Japan almost always goes by its French name, gateau chocolat, for some reason.) The Strawberry Shortcake from Petit Decorer is lovely, but does nothing to distinguish itself from the thousands of others like it - it's sweet, fruity, and very light, which is all you really want from a cake like this anyway.
This one, also from Petit Decorer, goes by the Frenchified name of Gateau Fraises, and is giving Laduree a run for its money with that fancy swirl of cream over a split glazed strawberry sprinkled with silver sugar dragees. The two thin layers of pistachio cake are sandwiched around vanilla custard cream and slightly macerated strawberries. There's also a dollop of custard underneath the cream swirl, holding together the strawberry on top. I should mention that in both these cakes, the strawberries were perfectly ripe, sweet, and delicious, which isn't always the case with pastries even in fruit-obsessed Japan. The Gateau Fraises is elegant, attractive, and a bit richer, like the grown-up sister to the sweet, simple Stawberry Shortcake.

Petit Decorer

Minami-azabu 1-4-21

http://decorer.jp

Peanut Butter

Ode to Peanut Butter

Shall I compare thee to a plain peanut?

Thou art more creamy and more spreadable.

When spread on bread thou art delicious, but

When licked straight from the spoon, delectable.

See this jar of peanut butter? I just opened it last week. It's my fifth jar of peanut butter since moving to Tokyo 14 months ago. Isn't that crazy? I only went through about two jars the whole three years I lived in Nashville. Why I've turned into a peanut-butter-monster since coming to the land where peanut butter either has to be brought in your suitcase, muled by your visitors, or bought from the import stores at an exorbitant price, is anyone's guess. But that is how it stands. I eat it straight from the spoon, and only sometimes spread it on bread or crackers (or, decadently, on chocolate cookies). It runs out fast.
I feel slightly better about my addiction because this is SMART BALANCE peanut butter, so it's good for me ... right? Let's look at the nutrition information. It has the same amount of fat, calories, and protein as your average jar of peanut butter, but it has a lot less sugar and enough potassium to balance out the sodium (as my brother's nutritionist fiancee pointed out). It tastes a bit more raw than Jif, which I actually like, though it does take a short while to get used to the change. By the way, in the chunky versus creamy debate, I say if you want chunky, just eat peanuts. If you want peanut butter, make it buttery smooth. And if you're headed to Tokyo, would you mind bringing me another jar?