One Soup Three Dishes: The Foundation of Japanese Cuisine

Five of the six courses that made up lunch at Fujita Japanese Cooking Studio

For all the incredible variety to be found kaiseki, the traditional multi-course Japanese meal that evolved from the tea ceremony, when you break it down to its  fundamentals, you'll arrive at ichiju san-sai, or "one soup, three dishes." Mentions of this meal-making concept can be traced back in literature over 1,000 years, and many attribute the healthiness and nutritional soundness of Japanese cuisine back to this ancient concept. The packed Japanese breakfast tray is an early morning riff on the concept, as is many a dinner on Japan Airlines, where the miso soup is poured from a plastic pitcher into paper cups.

An example of the packed Japanese breakfast tray,
this one at Tokaitei in the Dai-Ichi Hotel, Tokyo.

Learning about these basic building blocks of Japanese eating were part of a crash course in Japanese foodways that I participated in as a member of an eight-day food fellowship trip sponsored by the Foreign Press Center/Japan.

Fujita-sensei working on fresh sea bream.

We spent one morning in the small kitchen of Takako Fujita, a cooking instructor whose school, Fujita Japanese Cooking Studio is tucked away in the unlikely Tokyo business district of Toranomon. We watched, agog, as Fujita-sensei and her assistant Naoko Sugiyama, both dressed in traditional kimono, conjured up an excellent six-course lunch with a minimum of movement and no fuss. It was a technically understated yet flawless performance that evoked the tea ceremony, only with more utensils and a foundation of kelp and bonito instead of matcha tea powder.

Fujita-sensei salting pork back rib slices for her rice dish. 

Fujita-sensei, now in her twenty-first year of teaching, says she knew nothing about cooking when she was in her 20s. It wasn't until she married that she took up the study of cooking as part of her "bride's training," she adds. For our lunch, she started by working on a dish of rice cooked in stock. It was a traditional takikomi-gohan, or seasoned rice cooked with mixed vegetables, but with a twist--the addition of thin slices of pork back rib meat. It's a dish Fujita-sensei created recently for for a Japanese cooking magazine. Rice, like pickles, is a standard accompaniment to the soup and three dishes of  ichiju san-sai  and so much a given that it goes without mention.

The "soup" in this iteration was an unusual one, centered on hanpen, a cloud-like version of fish cake that has  been pounded and spongified with grated mountain yam and beaten egg whites. The hanpen slices floated in a clear dashi made with konbu (kelp) and katsuobushi (grated dried bonito) and garnished with mitsuba (a parsley-like green). As if it weren't light enough, Fujita-sensei added beaten egg whites at the end to up the lightness ante.

Simmered yellowtail with ginger and pickled plums.

The san-sai, part of the meal, or "three dishes," usually consists of a main dish and two side dishes. The main more often than not involves fish. In our lunch, it was a beautiful dish of yellowtail simmered with ginger and umeboshi (pickled plums) with just a little added mirin, sugar and salt. The secrets here were to employ the traditional Japanese method of sprinkling a little salt on the fish to draw out impurities, and to add ginger skins to the broth. In addition to adding flavor, the ginger skins balance the broth and take away any overly strong fish flavors, Fujita-sensei told us. As in this dish, she often uses milder, Kyoto-style seasoning in her class, she says, "because lighter seasoning is more popular" among her students.

The two secondary dishes of ichiju san-sai usually include a vegetable dish and a legume or soybean-based dish, rounding out a balanced meal with plenty of fermented foods. Long before the start of the fermented food craze that is sweeping certain artisanal corners of America--touted for its probiotic-promoting goodness--the Japanese had build a nation on miso, soy sauce, sake, mirin and pickled and preserved products.

Fujita-sensei and her assistant Sugiyama san bidding us farewell.

For a savory dish of stewed taro dressed in a mix of sesame paste, white miso, sugar and mirin, the tips Fujita-sensei gave us were to boil the taro very quickly in water used to wash rice and a splash of mirin. This keeps its color light and also hastens cooking. The dish was called "Rikyu-style," after the famed sixteenth-century tea master Sen no Rikyu, who apparently loved sesame seeds.

Fujita-sensei says that as in other developed countries, fewer and fewer young Japanese are learning to cook from their mothers or grandmothers, adding that not many young people are interested in cooking traditional dishes. After Japanese-style washoku cooking was named a UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage, however, interest in their native cuisine has revived somewhat among young people, she says.

For more on washoku, and how the Japanese government is working to spread its techniques, flavors and spirit around the world, check out my Discover Nikkei article on the Washoku World Challenge 2015.

When Cheese Met Sake: The New Franco-Japanese Alliance

Hakkaisan Sparkling Nigori sake with (clockwise from
top left, Bleu d'Auvergne, Brillat Savarin,
 and 18-month old Mimolette cheeses.

The Japanese brewed beverage sake seems to be everywhere now...or is it just me?

Probably a little bit of both. Ever since I started writing about sake I seem to have entered a parallel sake-loving universe. Last night was a good example. The French Cheese Board hosted a sake and fromage pairing at its storefront on West 39th Street near Bryant Park.

For all of you cheese lovers, the space includes a small cheese store with a well-curated selection of French cheeses that rotate on a monthly basis as well as French butter. There's also a handsome kitchen and a gallery. Charles Duque, managing director of the FCB, and Akiko Katayama, a Japanese food writer and culinary diplomat, were our hosts.

In Japan, sake has been steadily declining in popularity since the mid-1970s, and so venturing into foreign markets (the U.S. and France are two top targets) is paramount for the industry. What I didn't know is that the same is true of artisanal cheese in France. The encroachment of cheaper mass-produced and foreign products has put small cheese-makers on a similar quest to open or expand foreign markets.

The cheese store at The Cheese Board.

Necessity may have driven French cheese and sake together, but as sommelier Keita Akaboshi first showed me, sake and cheese can make a beautiful combination. Katayama, our teacher for the night, explained that one reason is that the high umami content of sake matches well with the umami in cultured cheeses. Japanese researchers have discovered 700 to 1,200 different flavor compounds in sake, compared to approximately 600 in wine, and around 400 in whiskey and other spirits.

She also taught us how to read a sake label. Most premium sakes will include what's known as Nihonshu-do, or a sake meter value, which tells you the sweetness or dryness level; the higher the number the dryer the sake. The first of three Hakkaisan Brewery sakes we tried was a sparkling nigori (unfiltered) sake, with a sake meter reading of -25, which is quite sweet. Acidity levels are also given, in this case a 1.7, higher than average to mask or balance its sweetness. Amino acid levels are also noted, with higher number indicating a richer-tasting sake and a lower number a lighter sake.

The sparkling sake was paired with a triple creme brie Brillat Savarin, the idea being that its high acidity would cut through the fat.

Next, a tokubetsu junmai, a smooth, much less sweet bottle, was paired with an 18-month-old Mimolette, the hard, nutty, orange cheese that gets its color from annatto seeds. Our favorite pairing, though, involved a Bleu d'Auvergne and an ashed chevre from P. Jacquin and Son, both of which were paired with a very sweet kijoshu sake. The blue is classified as a PDO, or Protected Designation of Origin, meaning it can only be produced in the region of the Auvergne by specially designated cows who've been raised on equally specific grass.

The high acidity of the kijoshu (made by adding more sake instead of water to the mix to give it a more viscous quality) balanced its extreme sweetness (sake meter value of -30). On the cheeses, it had the effect of taking the edge off their pungency while pulling out their umami. As Celia, my companion in tasting said, "It was our 'aha moment.'"

To learn more about what I've learned about sake, take a look at this article, on the rise of sake's popularity in New York City, and my most recent story, on a Japanese sake yeast expert who is pinning his hopes for the industry on the discovery of new yeasts taken from native flowers.

The French Cheese Board
26 West 39th Street
New York, NY 10018
(212) 302-3390
Web site: http://frenchcheeseboard.com/