Viaggio in Giappone: da Tokyo a Izumo

I've stopped blogging for a while for some good reasons. At first, I was finishing up some stuff from my work at Berkeley. Then my mom came to visit me for 12 days. It was really nice to have her here, and I could write a few posts about what we visited in that period. Finally Matt and I just came back from a wonderful trip to Japan, lasted 13 days. We had so many diverse experiences that I want to write down a few of them before I forget. So, I hope you'll enjoy this series of posts about Japan (some of them may be written by Matt), and please bear with me if I still haven't posted the roundup for the last Fresh Produce of the Month.

We landed in Tokyo, Narita Airport, on July 15th -- my birthday! For the first two nights we were hosted by a Japanese family (Yukiko & Carlos), living in the Shinbuya district of Tokyo. We found this family through the really nice website 'Japan Cycling'. This is a great resource for anybody who's interested in biking in Japan. There are many suggested bike trips, a forum where you can post questions, and lists of people who are available to give you information, guided tours, or even host you for a few nights during your trip to Japan. We were hosted by two different families, and were going to be hosted by a third, had our trip plan allowed that. We found these experiences incredibly rewarding, and received much more than a bed to sleep.

So, for the first night in Tokyo, Yukiko had planned a Japanese cooking lesson for us! It was a wonderful birthday present for me. More details about this in a dedicated food post. The morning after, she brought us for a bike ride in Tokyo. This was a great experience, part of the 'Tokyo Great Cycling Tour' that she runs together with a few other people, highly recommended if you want a guided 1-day bike tour in Tokyo. We started at 4:30 in the morning, in order to get to see the tuna auction at the famous Tokyo fish market. At this time of the day, lots of frozen tuna arrives at the market.
And at 5 am, the auction starts.



I had never been to an auction before, but Matt told me that it was quite similar to auctions in the US.
Shortly after, we had our first really good sushi. The sushi at the Tokyo Fish Market is one of the best you can have, and apparently early in the morning is the best time to try it. Here is our proud sushi chef, holding a shiso leaf.
And here is some of the fish he used for sushi. It was definitely the best sushi we ever had, and still is.
During our bike ride through Tokyo, we discovered how multifaceted this city is: small canals running between skyscrapers..
.. Hidden shrines..
.. And very tall buildings with lots of signs on them (we just found out these particular ones are ads for bars, on the left side, and loan companies, on the right side).

This is a typical shot of old, sacred Tokyo, together with modern Tokyo:

Later, Matt and I walked through downtown Tokyo, again wandering through a mixture of small alleys..
.. and large boulevards

just a few blocks away from each other.

On the third day, we rode a train to Yokohama, where we met our second host family, Yoko and Hideo. Yoko brought us around Yokohama all the afternoon looking for bikes. The quest for bikes turned out to be a lot harder than we thought, and it will be the subject of another post. Anyway, after many hours spent both in Tokyo with Yukiko and in Yokohama with Yoko, we finally got the two bikes: a red Louis Garneau that I used

and Matt's first Corvette.

The evening with Yoko and Hideo was very pleasant, and we had some cultural food exchange: the day after was going to be 'eel day', so Yoko prepared 'Three style eel', and I made some 'peperoni con bagna caoda' for them. I thought I would do something new for them, but to me surprise, they perfectly knew what 'bagna caoda' was, as soon as I mentioned the name of it... This was the first time I realized how well Japanese people know about Italian cuisine. Here are Yoko and Hideo, cheering with us:
We also had a very nice traditional Japanese breakfast with them the day after, and we planned a little of our bike trip together. Then, we packed our bikes, and left on the shinkansen train for Okoyama, where we were to get on another express train for Izumo.

You can see a sketch of our trip here:
The transfers that we did by train are the black lines, whereas the bike rides are in red (obviously, much less straight than these lines :) ).

Why Izumo? Every Japanese person we met asked this with an accompanying 'ooooohh' expressing deep surprise. Well, Izumo has the oldest and one of the largest shrines in Japan. Also, it's on a flat part of Japan, from which we could easily bike eastwards, towards Kyoto. Finally, in Izumo there is the 'e-dashi' store that Matt recently ordered katsuobushi from, and we really wanted to meet their owners. The part of this story relative to katsuobushi will be written by Matt in another post. Here I will just say that the visit with Hiromi and her family was really memorable. We got to spend time as a family for a whole day and a half. They brought us out for breakfast and lunch, and we visited the Izumo Taisha (shrine) together. The Taisha is huge.
This is the front entrance, leading into a forest.
Before approaching the shrine, you must ritually wash your hands.

Once at the shrine, you should throw a symbolic offer in a box right outside, then bow and clap your hands, and bow again. These ritual movements should be repeated a precise number of times, and performed together with the person you love for a blessing for your future life together. Matt and I tried -- although our attempt was rather clumsy, and we earned some laughs from the people in line after us.


The shrine has a number of smaller temples, and in a particular spot people buy omikuji, little pieces of paper with writings that predict good things happening to you in the year to come, or things you should pay attention to. Here was mine.

After you get your omikuji, you should then tie it to a tree closeby, for the good things to become true. Here are Matt and Hiromi's husband Haruo tying theirs.

And here is how one of the trees looked like, with all the omikuji tied to!

Another good-luck action you can do is throwing a coin in the air, so that it gets stuck between the straw of the huge knots hung in front of another temple. This is a pretty hard thing to achieve, because the straw is very thick, so the coins mostly bounce back. However, Matt was able to get his coin in at the first attempt! I gave up after a few times, instead.

After the visit to the shrine and a dashi-making lesson that will be described later, we were planning on leaving by bike to Matsue. However, a tremendous rain stopped us, and therefore we spent the evening in the really pleasant company of Hiromi and her family, tasting some more wonderful homecooked Japanese food.

The day after, we were finally ready for our first day of serious biking. Right before leaving, though, Matt realized that something very important was missing: his keys! These not only included the Berkeley house keys, but also the only copy of the bike lock that we just used to tie our bikes together in front of the hotel. The lock was a pretty serious U-lock, almost impossible to pick. And, it was a national holiday, so no professional could help us. Our savior turned out to be Hiromi's friend Mairin, who had already been of great help translating our English into Japanese and viceversa the day before. Her husband, aka Superman, took our bikes to his shop, and with an electric saw he cut through the U-lock in less than thirty seconds.
So here we are, finally, really ready to leave -- Matt and Hiromi, at the two ends of the group, are holding the two pieces of the broken lock.


[To be continued]

Quest for Katsuobushi

[This is a guest posting by Matt.]

First, thanks Marta for granting me this indulgence to hold forth on an obsession.

Anyone who has had any Japanese food has tasted the flavor imparted by katsuobushi, but I first became aware of the ingredient itself through its description in Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking: "The most remarkable preserved fish is katsuobushi, a cornerstone of Japanese cooking, which dates from around 1700 and is made most often from one fish, the skip jack tuna [bonito]." Katsuobushi is produced through a three to five month process involving boiling, weeks of hot-smoking, and finally a series of fermentations. "At the end, the meat has turned light brown and dense; when struck it's said to sound like a resonant piece of wood," McGee continues. "Why go to all this trouble? Because it accumulates a spectrum of flavor molecules whose breadth is approached only in the finest cured meats and cheeses."

Since I read this years ago I've kept my eye out for whole katsuobushi. Of course, in powdered form, it is a basic ingredient in Hon-Dashi, used to make instant soup stock, or dashi. It's also not hard to find in flakes; these are the shavings of katsuobushi that are an intermediate in making dashi.

Indian food tastes better when the spices are ground fresh, because the aromas dissipate rapidly after grinding. Same goes for coffee. Might the same be true of katsuobushi? What if the pre-flaked katsuobushi has but a shadow of its full flavor? I wanted to find the whole stuff.

Once I set to the task in earnest, it was surprisingly difficult. Locally, the best bet was Berkeley's Tokyo Fish Market. Plenty of instant dashi and bonito flakes, but a clerk there told me that whole katsuobushi is almost impossible to find in the United States. Without much hope of success, I also inquired at Japan Woodworker. They sell a lot of Japanese planes, and the Japanese use a special plane to making the katsuobushi shavings. Their kitchen section has expanded a lot in recent years, so I thought this would be a nice area of intersection between woodworking and cooking. (Indeed, I planned to dust off my underutilized planes when it came time to make my own shavings.) Unfortunately, they didn't carry katsuobushi or the plane for it. However, I did have an interesting talk with one of the owners, who had inherited a kastuobushi plane from his father, together with a now 60-year-old piece of katsuobushi.

To the internets! As expected, the web has a lot of good information about katsuobushi. I recommend wikipedia and this article from the Tokyo Foundation. The latter Japanese slow food site has a number of other interesting articles as well. However, when it came to finding whole katsuobushi for sale, the English-speaking internet had nothing. We did find instructions in Japanese about how to make katsuobushi. According to google translate, one step is this:

これで裸節のできあがりです。 I finished the section in the nude.

We like our food to be natural, but maybe not that natural.

Googling did yield a promising site written entirely in Japanese, e-dashi. After weeks of waiting, hoping I guess that katsuo would fall from the sky, we decided to make an order in a language we couldn't understand. The strategy was simple: use google translate and try to divine the original meaning. Do we really want to order "sections of this blight," we asked ourselves? Yes! Confirm buttons were a bit tricky. For that you have to paste the html source (Control-U) into google translate and look for the form fields.

Once the order process was completed, we realized that we had never typed in a credit card number. That happened only after several emails. The first was an auto-reply. The second said the shipping charges were being calculated. The third gave a shipping amount and, according to google translate, required me to confirm. At this point, I gave my sheepish reply, saying I didn't know Japanese, and then writing it in English. Fortunately the person on the other end, Hiromi Nagase, was extremely nice and forgiving, and went to the trouble of writing a reply in English. Hiromi was not at all confident in her English writing, but as someone who has had to edit papers from mechanical engineers, I've seen much worse. In fact, I shouldn't be using "worse", because everything was perfectly clear. Domo arigato gozaimasu, Hiromi-san!

The package came within a week. There may have been a slower, cheaper shipping option, but we're about to go to Japan, so it had to come fast. Why not wait and get it in Japan? Because evidently it's hard to find even there: Our Japanese friend Keisuke had never seen katsuobushi in the flesh.

Anyway, here it is. As you unwrap it, you are hit by a burst of smoky aroma. If you knock on it, it really does sound like a piece of wood.


Here is my British hand plane confusedly making shavings from it. If you are able to get katsuobushi, but don't have or want to invest in a hand plane, you could use a Microplane cheese grater. After all, Microplanes were sold first to woodworkers before chefs discovered they make grate greaters. The shavings would be much finer than those shown here, but they'd probably make good soup. Treat them like a fine grind of coffee, and don't let them steep quite as long.


Honestly I don't understand why this step is enough to stop people from making dashi from whole katsuobushi. It doesn't take long at all, and what's left over is easier to manage in this compact form.

Now for suppo: First step is to add kombu, which is dried kelp. Bring to a boil, then remove the kelp.


Then add the katsuobushi shavings


Return to a boil, and let it steep for a bit. This is vague here, because, despite dire warnings about oversteeping of the form "even master chefs worry that they may be boiling it too long" (instead of worrying, why don't they measure time and temperature, these master chefs?), it doesn't seem that sensitive to the specifics. Anyway, this seems like one of those things said only to deter people from doing things themselves.

Strain. Add miso, or if you want to try the broth plain, salt and msg. Serve:



Ah yes, I almost forgot. How does it taste? There's a short answer and a long answer. The short answer is, Very good!

The long answer: How often we forget to taste familiar foods. The ritual of eating becomes a reward separate from taste. But, if circumstances are right, one can be jarred out of this trance into awareness. How often does one taste soup, a comfort food, as carefully as one tastes wine? I certainly don't. But since the katsuobushi came at such trouble and with such anticipation, it demanded focus. And focus it received. The initial smoky aromas recalled for me the smell of camping as a child. That part was obvious. More subtle was a certain minerality, the smell of the sea, but not fishy, though that was there too. Here is a food with flavors from old trees, from deep water, and with earthy decay. Here is a food that had the attention of people practicing a time honored practice, and which was sold by nice people who believe in it. Better than the instant stuff? You bet.