Cuisine / Japanese Cuisine
Japanese cuisine is to Asia what French cuisine is to Europe: the ultimate in elegance of food preparation. Traditionally French and Japanese cuisine otherwise do not have much in common. However, the French nouvelle cuisine had, knowingly or unknowingly, adopted quite a bit of the Japanese philosophy of food preparation, as for example the great importance put on the freshness of ingredients and exercising restraint in cooking to avoid overcooking.
Unique to Japanese cuisine is the large number of raw foods, chiefly raw fish (sashimi). Tuna (akami) is the main fish used for sashimi. The raw fish is eaten with soy sauce and a green horse-radish mustard (wasabe).
Whereas the most peculiar way of serving fish is raw, the most peculiar preparation of shrimp and squid is to dip it in flour and then deep-fry them. This way of preparation is called tempura. Vegetables are also commonly cooked tempura style.
Meat plays less of a role in traditional Japanese cuisine than in any other cuisine of the world. Actually in classical Japan it was barely considered fit for human consumption and rarely eaten. But as Japan has hesitatingly let in outside influence, meat is much more common now than in the past.
The most famous Japanese meat is Kobe beef. Kobe is a city near Tokyo, but the term "Kobe beef" describes a manner of raising rather than the origin of the cattle. To raise beef in Kobe tradition means to pamper it, to administer massages to the living beef, and to feed it on an special diet including beer to keep the animal constantly relaxed and lazy. It thus is no surprise that Kobe beef is really expensive. A Kobe steak can easily cost a thousand Baht in not even a very exclusive restaurant. But not many restaurants have it on their menu.
Steak anyway is not the most common Japanese cut of beef. More often it is thinly sliced in bite size and then lightly boiled and served with glass noodles, bean curd (tofu), and a lot of vegetables. The Japanese name of this dish is sukiyaki. Cooking sukiyaki requires so little effort that it is often done at the table and while eating.
Pork and chicken on the contrary are often fried and spiced with ginger and sesame. Another common meat seasoning is teriyaki, a sweetened soy sauce.
In Japanese dining order soups are not eaten before the main course but at the same time. Japanese cuisine has a number of fish soups; the most peculiar, however, is miso soup, made of dissolved soy bean paste. It is a side dish to many meals.
In modern times, noodle soups have been popularized in Japan mainly because they are so readily available in instant packages. In Thailand, too, groceries and supermarkets meanwhile sell many brands of instant noodle soup. Nissin Ramen is a brand originally from Japan (ramen being the Japanese word for noodles).
As Thailand herself prepares some of the best soups in the world, Japanese cuisine in Thailand certainly does not put an emphasis on soups.
As throughout East Asia, the staple food in Japan is rice (golan). However, there are some typical Japanese methods of preparation.
Every Westerner thinks of rolls baked from wheat flour. But the Japanese make rolls from rice; not from rice flour but from cooked glutinous rice. This rice is wrapped in leaves and served cold, and just like a sandwich it has cold cuts and a spread with it. However, the cold cuts are not sausage or meat but seafood or fish, and the spread is not mayonnaise but Japanese horse-radish mustard, wasabe. This kind of rice sandwiches are called sushi, and they are mostly eaten as a kind of hors d’oeuvre.
There are a number of preparations resembling those of neighboring countries. The Japanese also pickle vegetables like the Koreans but pickled vegetables (oshinko) are not as important to the Japanese table as are the kimchi to the Koreans.
The most typical Japanese dessert is chawan mushi, an egg custard cream.
Japanese cuisine is cheap nowhere in the world. For fish to be eaten raw it must be very fresh. Transportation and storage therefore is much more an effort which increases the cost. By no means is eating Japanese in Japan cheap; Bangkok is a cheaper place for eating Japanese foods than Tokyo or Osaka.
A good deal for eating Japanese are the lunch and dinner buffets of five-star hotels. Commonly the buffets of five-star hotels are dedicated to the cuisine of a different nation every month, and usually once a year they are Japanese. Raw fish is not a very filling dish; therefore the portions that can be eaten of sashimi are much larger than those of a stew or of steaks.
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