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Dining Guide
/ 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 them 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.
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.
Other descriptions:
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