Sakura in February

Not to get too political on a food blog, but all the conspiracy theorists who think three feet of snow in DC proves that climate change is a hoax just need to come visit Tokyo. Last time I checked, cherry blossom season was in April, or late March at the earliest. Well, these photos were taken yesterday and today, February 28. Yes, they're lovely... but it's feared that if the winters get any warmer Japan will no longer have cherry blossoms at all. They need a certain period of cold weather in order to bloom. I'd feel better about enjoying them if they'd make me wait until April.
These are just the first few trees to bloom, of course - though there are buds everywhere. These last two photos (unless, of course, they're actually plum trees - it's hard to tell sometimes) are from Aoyama Cemetery, where a whole grove of sakura has burst out in pink, an incongruous wash of bright color among the graves. The whole cemetery is lined with gnarled, ancient cherry trees, none blooming quite yet. It will really be gorgeous when they do.

Le Pommier

I have to admit, I've been avoiding Le Pommier out of loyalty to Petit Decorer, the much smaller and humbler, yet surely just as delicious, patisserie at the end of my street. I pass them both every day on my way to and from work, the supermarket, the subway station - pretty much everywhere I go - so I always feel better choosing the shop that probably needs my support more. However, by now I've already tried pretty much everything Petit Decorer has to offer, and the admittedly much more colorful displays at Le Pommier were calling to me. So I gave it a try.

First up was the Yoyo aux Fraises above. This giant-sized strawberry macaron, standing on end with powdered-sugar-dusted strawberry quarters wedged into the rippled white buttercream piped around the circumference, is both a simple extension of the ever-popular macaron cookie and an apparently unique concept - I've never seen such a thing anywhere else. I wasn't sure how to eat it, with fork or fingers, and while both French and Japanese people would probably have chosen the fork, I ended up picking it apart. The buttercream was quite stiff and came off in pieces; the macaron crumbled when squeezed too hard, making it impossible to just pick it up and eat it like a sandwich. Inside was a wobbly strawberry panna cotta, cemented to the cookies with thinly spread buttercream. It was fancy and fun to eat, but the flavor wasn't outstanding - the fresh strawberries were probably the best part.
The second cake I tried really was amazing. It's called Piemont and consists of a dry, crumbly European-style hazelnut cake layer topped with three strata of chocolate and chocolate-hazelnut mousses. The sides are very thin plates of dark chocolate, and the top is glazed with ganache and decorated with milk chocolate rosebuds, caramelized hazelnuts, and a piece of paper that says "Le Pommier." This was so delicious I could have eaten a whole nother piece. It also kept me up till one in the morning. Maybe one of those layers of mousse was coffee flavored.

Le Pommier has a huge array of beautiful cakes and other Frenchy baked goods like croissants, madeleines, and breton sables. I'm sure I'll be back... stay tuned!

Le Pommier

Azabu Juban 3-9-2

Minato-ku, Tokyo

Ameyoko-cho, Part II

Ameyoko-cho gets its name from the period of the U.S. occupation, when this street served as the black market for imported cigarettes, meat, and other hard-to-find items that somehow got slipped out of the American markets and re-sold to the local people. "Ame" is short for America; "yoko-cho" means side street or alley. In addition to the grocery and clothing shops, there are also little eating shops where you can get sushi, octopus dumplings, fruit-on-a-stick, and in this multicultural age, Korean pancakes and the hugely popular doner kebabs too. Under the railroad tracks and in the open squares where streets cross, there are smaller grill carts set up where vendors cook various traditional street foods.
The round cake shown at the top, just above, and in the final picture in this post, is billed as "Ameyoko-yaki," though it looks to me like the same thing they call "Osaka-yaki" in Western Japan. It's a pancake batter filled with tiny dried shrimp, shredded cabbage, red sour pickles, and a whole egg, sprinkled with powdered nori seaweed, and cooked in circle-shaped molds in a special grill. When done, it's brushed with special sweet-salty sauce and squirted with mayonnaise.
Here's a similar street food, tako-yaki or octopus dumplings, which has similar ingredients and is served with similar sauces, but is cooked in a ball-shaped mold. This particular tako-yaki shop isn't on a temporary cart but has its own space in the row of awnings.
Here's another street cart offering, the extremely simple and traditional treat called isobe-yaki. It's nothing but a plain dried cut rice cake (kiri-mochi) grilled over charcoal, brushed with soy sauce, and wrapped in a strip of nori, the same seaweed used for sushi rolls. But this simple combination can be transcendent, especially when the mochi is fresh-made. Over the coals, it takes on a smoky flavor that complements the salty soy sauce and nori, and the mochi, which starts out as a hard block, becomes gooey and soft inside, crisp and toasty-brown outside. It's a nostalgic taste, perfectly suited to this vibrant outdoor market out of Tokyo's past.

Ameyoko-cho

Between Ueno and Ueno-Okachimachi Stations, in an alley that runs beside and partially underneath the JR railroad tracks, there's a street market called Ameyoko that feels like another time and place, completely different from the clean and modern Tokyo just a few blocks away. The tiny shops display their wares beneath awnings - everything from shoes piled up haphazardly in stacks of boxes to bathing suits to frozen fatty tuna to wonderful baskets of rainbow-hued beans, nuts, and dried fruits. The shopkeepers maintain a noisy chorus of enticement, advertising their low prices and inviting customers to come and buy. The last time I visited the market, it was so tightly packed that it was hard to move forward, but today it was raining and not quite as busy. Still, there were enough people that if I hadn't seen it before I would have been a bit irritated with the crowd.

Though there are all kinds of things for sale in Ameyoko-cho, there are probably more food shops than anything else. They sell in large quantities and at reduced prices from what you'd see in the supermarket or even at another old-fashioned market like the waterside Tsukiji, famous for its crack of dawn tuna auctions. Above, there are a variety of sea products: clockwise from the top right, yellow herring roe, little dried minnows for making broth, black seaweed called wakame (a steal for just 300 yen! I should have bought some!), which is often used in miso soup, and salted salmon steaks, a common item on the traditional breakfast table.
Here are some more fishy products, an amazing variety of tiny dried fish, which are often sprinkled on salads or tofu or rice. They can be deep fried or eaten plain. From left to right above are baby sardines, tiny shrimp, and baby fish of another kind - to tell the truth, I never realized there were so many types of baby fish.
Here's an example of price slashing - huge octopus arms, half price! To their left is sweet-soy-sauce basted grilled eel (eel is almost always sold already cooked, as its high oil content makes it a challenge to cook well), and above them are more fish and fish eggs.

Of course, it's not only seafood for sale. Here's a produce stall selling apples, grapes, oranges, and shiitake mushrooms. There's also an indoor market beneath the street that houses a few ethnic (i.e., non-Japanese) shops, mostly Chinese and Southeast Asian. That basement has to be the most pungent place in Tokyo - the air is full of the odors of fish and meat, and since it's underground there's nowhere for the smell to go. And I'm just guessing, but the tripe and pig's feet can't be helping matters.

More Sweets from St Moritz

In my last post I wrote about Bake Shop St Moritz. Here I'd like to get into a bit more detail about a few of the pastries they sell. First up is the Apple Kuchen. I've never had a real kuchen in either Europe or America, so I have no idea how authentic this one is, but I can confirm that it's quite tasty. The apples (there are also some raisins in there) are melty-soft and spiced, though not aggressively, with cinnamon and nutmeg. The outside is a layer of what seems like yeasted puff pastry, flaky on the outside, tender on the inside. The surprise (for me, anyway) is that it's not simply rolled up - the innermost layer is actually a piece of sponge cake, not the inside of a puff pastry spiral. The apples and their juices soak into the cake, while the pastry remains puffy. I reheated it in the microwave and it was delicious.
This is a chocolate-filled coronet, made of a similar yeasted puff pastry twisted into a horn shape. The bakery also sells a version that's not flaky, just regular soft dough. The chocolate filling was a bit disappointing, more puddingy and less chocolatey than I would have liked. However, this is a not uncommon flaw in this kind of pastry, and I wasn't surprised. Chocolate and vanilla cream-filled coronets are very popular in Japan and I've sampled a lot of them. Sadly, this was not among the best I've had, though it was certainly better than the kind you might buy at a convenience store.

Here is the most uniquely Japanese treat I sampled: the Sweet Potato. Made out of just sweet potatoes, sugar, butter, and eggs, with the possible addition of some wheat flour, it's very similar in taste to an actual Japanese sweet potato, though the texture is more cake-like. I think the shape must be meant to resemble a potato, too.

Here's my favorite again, the earl grey chiffon cake, shown here alongside a cup of coffee. Who says you can't have tea and coffee together?

Bake Shop St Moritz

Bake Shop St Moritz, on the street leading from Azabu Juban Station toward the back of Roppongi Hills, is a quirky Euro-Japanese bakery that's not quite like anywhere else. As you would expect from the name, there are plenty of treats with central-European lineage, such as a babka-like chocolate-swirled sweet bread, apple kuchen filled with spiced fruit, and ring-shaped, sugar-covered lemon cakes. But they also have the full range of weird Japanese baked goods: "Siberia" cake (two layers of pound cake with an equally thick layer of red bean paste in between), soft cream-filled buns, and the sweet known as "Sweet Potato" (the English words, pronounced sui-toh po-teh-toh) which is a finger-shaped cake made of golden Japanese sweet potatoes. They also have sandwiches made of white bread and various fillings: egg salad, fish roe, pork cutlet, curry, whipped cream with fruit... the usual.

The shelves are often nearly bare by late afternoon - to see everything they make, you have to go early. I visited around ten in the morning on a recent weekend, and the shelves were still packed and stacked. The bakery itself is in a back room, and each individual item is wrapped in homey plastic wrap, just as if your mom had made it. The only two ladies I've ever seen behind the counter are both gray-haired, motherly types. Note that there are boxes of cookies on the counter by the cash register, which you might not see until it's too late. I've never actually tried them, but it would be interesting to see how they treat the occasional American-style treat they offer. Besides the cookies, they also have the Japanese interpretation of muffins - a little cylindrical cake baked in a scallop-edged wrapper that stands straight up and isn't pleated, so that they don't really have a traditional muffin shape at all. You can see some on the left in the picture above.

This is what I almost always do get: earl grey flavored chiffon cake sandwiched around a filling of cream whipped so thickly it's practically butter. This is on my list of things I must learn how to make so I'll still have it when I eventually leave Japan. The top and bottom edges of the cake are almost caramelized and just barely crisp, but the inside is like a velvet sponge, without the slightest crumbliness. The tea flavor isn't very obvious, but it does give it a dimension beyond just sweet. But the main think I like about this cake is the texture - the thickness of the cream and the bouncy pillowiness of the cake.

Yakitori

Okay, meat lovers, here's another post just for you! On my way home from work every day, I ride my bike right past this little sidewalk shop. Beneath red lanterns spelling out "yakitori," a little old man and a little old lady grill skewers of chicken over a small charcoal grill. Next to the grill are two light-boxes, one for keeping grilled skewers hot, the other containing grilled chicken parts. There's a small table with stools in front of the shop for those too hungry to wait, but I suspect most of their business is takeout. There's almost always at least one or two people lined up, waiting for their grilled to order chicken.
Basic yakitori is probably one of the most squeamish-foreigner-friendly foods Japan has to offer. Little bite-sized pieces of chicken on a stick - what could be simpler? Well, the truth is that you could get into a lot of trouble with yakitori. It's not just the meat they grill, but the liver, the heart, the gizzard, the cartilage... in short, no part of the chicken goes to waste. On the other hand, there are lots of choices for safe, simple meat. You can get chicken-with-onions, breast meat, thigh meat, even a super special young chicken meat at some shops. So if you're a meat eater, enjoy yakitori. Just make sure to go with someone who you trust to order what you want to order.

Escazu Artisan Chocolates

When I was at Whole Foods in Nashville over the winter break, I picked up a couple of bars of a brand of chocolate I'd never seen before: Escazu. Made in Raleigh, N.C., the three-ounce chocolate bars come in six flavors. I chose cacao nib and sea salt.

According to the package and the website, the company roasts, grinds, and refines its own cocoa beans, then crafts each bar in small batches, often made-to-order. The ingredients list, always the first thing I look at on a chocolate bar, is short and sweet: cocoa beans, sugar, cocoa butter, vanilla bean, and the featured flavor, cacao nib in the one and sea salt in the other. If you compare this to most commercial bars, you'll notice the main thing missing is soy lecithin. I don't know whether it's the soy itself, or just the fact that the candy is being processed for shelf-stability rather than for fresh flavor, but most chocolates without soy lecithin taste a lot better than those that have it.

Escazu is no exception. The cacao nib bar is both sharp and fruity, a nice sweet-and-sour flavor. It tastes strongly of chocolate rather rather than fat or sugar, though it does have a softer texture than my favorite Italian chocolate bars. The cacao nibs are not very noticeable, though they probably increased the chocolate flavor. I also like the thickness of the bar and the size of the slightly rounded squares. It doesn't beat out Amadei or Domori in my book, but it is definitely one of the best American-made chocolate I've had.

Escazu Artisan Chocolates

www.escazuchocolates.com

O-tsukemono

I've always been a pickle-eater. Family legend has it that when I was a baby, and the very opposite of a picky eater, someone urged my mom to try me on a pickle. Now my mom hates pickles, so I had never encountered one before, and I can only imagine how she might have brought herself to find one and feed it to her firstborn child. Well, suffice it to say that she did, and I ate it, and I've been eating pickles happily ever since.

Japanese pickles aren't quite the same as the dills and bread-and-butter pickles I grew up with, naturally, but they're just as captivating. There are numerous types of pickles. One of the most basic, shown above, is applied to all kinds of vegetables, from skinny Japanese eggplants to orange pumpkins, and is just a basic, slightly sweet brine, similar to the makings of a dill pickle only without any herbs or spices (though sometimes yuzu peel is added, giving it a citrusy fragrance, or maybe some bits of red hot pepper, giving it a kick).

Much more pungent is the Nara-tsuke, a specialty of western Japan, which involves marinating vegetables in a miso paste concoction until they're completely unidentifiable and almost inedibly sweet and salty. The texture is crunchy but with a faintly gelatinous spring; the thin slices have the richly-colored translucence of stained glass. They're so strong that they have to be eaten in very small quantities, usually together with a lot of rice.

Wagashi

Wagashi, which literally means "Japanese sweets," are colorful, often flower-shaped cakes or candies traditionally served with whisked powdered green tea as part of the tea ceremony. The shape, decoration, and colors chosen are supposed to reflect the season, so you see a lot of pink cherry blossoms in spring, red maple leaves in autumn, and camellias in winter. The photos taken here are from early summer, and even if I didn't have dates on my photos, I would know that from the abundance of green leaves, sunflowers, and poppies on display. In the tea ceremony, wagashi are carefully lifted from a communal tray with long wooden chopsticks and placed on a small piece of folded rice paper in front of each participant; the cakey variety are eaten by slicing into slivers or pieces with a tiny bamboo knife.
Though most wagashi involve some combination of sweet bean paste and rice flour, there are variations. In the tray on the right of the picture above, you can see a manju type sweet cake, the white ball at the top, which is a steamed dough wrapped around red or white bean paste. Below it, the brown and yellow squares are a confection consisting of candied chestnuts suspended in a firm bean paste jelly. The pretty green and pink balls at the far lower right are probably made of bean paste through and through, the outside soft and crumbly, the inside a firmer red bean paste. I have to admit, this last kind is not my favorite - there's something just too insubstantial about it. I like my bean paste wrapped in something I can sink my teeth into.
In general, I feel like wagashi are better to look at than to eat. Even though they come in such a variety of shapes and styles, all of them taste pretty much the same, and often more care has gone into the presentation than the taste. However, sometimes you get lucky - the bean paste is perfectly smooth and has been sweetened just barely enough, the lovely flower-like outside layer is either crunchy with sugar or a taut manju skin or a chewy mochi texture. These photos are from Nishiki Market in Kyoto, but any department store will have similar offerings in the food basement. And if you find yourself at a tea ceremony, you'll be able to sample wagashi where it's meant to be, alongside a bowl of frothy green tea.

Vending Machines

Right across the street from my apartment building is another apartment building whose first floor houses a little mom-and-pop tobacco shop. The shop is flanked by vending machines selling coffee, tea, juice, cigarettes, even steamy cans of corn soup -- a veritable oasis glowing in the night. Japanese vending machines offer an amazing array of beverages hot and cold, and there's also the odd machine selling vegetables, eggs, milk, or plastic work gloves. Why not, after all? Open 24 hours a day and situated every couple of hundred meters on almost every street, they even have the ubiquitous convenience store beat for convenience (except when you're out and about and dying of thirst on a hot summer day, in which case a vending machine will inevitably be impossible to find).
The coffee-and-cigarettes combination is a common one. Here's another location, another pair. Japan does have an age limit for smoking, and I assume the machines have some means of checking the purchaser's ID, but for all I know it could be on the honor system. Having never tried to buy either alcohol or tobacco from a machine, I can't say exactly how it works, but it's a fact that vending machines sell both.
Coca Cola has come a long way from its Atlanta origins, and some of its innovations for the Japanese market are fascinating. Besides the usual sodas, there are hot cans of "Georgia" brand coffee (you can tell whether the item is hot or cold by the red or blue color beneath it), a whole line of different green teas in bottles, and the sports drink Aquarius (its Japanese competitor is called Pocari Sweat -- so appetizing!). Vending machines only offer hot drinks in the colder months, from about October to March. A warm can of coffee is a wonderful hand-warmer, and the sweet, milky types are quite tasty in a sugary way. The black coffee is fairly mild and a bit metallic from the can. But the bottled green teas are one of the reasons to love Japan. Unsweetened, they're cool, refreshing, and have just the right balance of bitterness and grassiness. But whatever beverage you're in the mood to drink, in Tokyo you can probably find it in a vending machine not far away.