Chef's Choice: Twenty-two Chefs Dish on Japanese Food Culture

One of the most entertaining reads of this fall for me was Chef's Choice: 22 Culinary Masters Tell How Japanese Food Culture Influenced Their Careers and Cuisine by Saori Kawano and Don Gabor.

Kawano, the founder and president of Korin Japanese Trading Corp., the Tribeca Japanese chef knife and tableware store, and writer Gabor have put together a series of interviews that will appeal to the aspiring chef or culinary student as well as anyone interesting in eating and cooking Japanese food. Each interview is divided into sections describing the chef's influences, career path, cuisine, training and "a day in the life," section devoted to amusing or instructive anecdotes.

Each chef was selected for his or her affinity and love for Japanese cuisine, so it's not surprising that Japanese influences figure heavily in their cooking. Some even have to hold back to keep from overdoing it. Eric Ripert says he's channeled his exposure to Japanese cuisine into his food at Le Bernardin, and notes. "Now I sometimes restrain myself because I discover that ninety percent of the menu has a Japanese influence. Then we have to go back to French cuisine--at least a little bit!" Increasing globalization means that an aware chef is plucking influences from a wide array of cuisines. The challenge, Ripert notes, "is to be creative without being disrespectful of tradition," to help customers "understand other food cultures."

But what does that mean?  Slavishly reproducing classic Japanese dishes, or riffing on them in a way appealing to western audiences? When foreign chefs depart from the traditional Japanese way of doing things it can be dismaying to Japanese customers. For example Wylie Dufresne, known for his intellectual, avant garde approach to cooking, makes a pumped-up dashi that registers on the palate like a pounding tsunami, not the gentle ocean swell of traditional dashi. Where Japanese chefs will immerse their bonito flakes into their konbu broth briefly, from ten to 30 seconds, Dufresne pushes the boundaries, going for a ten-minute soak.  Japanese customers will complain; this is not the soft, gentle umami they are used to. "I don't know whether it's right or wrong, but it's different." says Dufresne.

Besides some mind-of-a-chef techniques, you'll learn a little about Japanese taste predilections. Cookbook author and teacher Elizabeth Andoh discusses the importance of mouth-feel to the Japanese. Ingredients that might be off-putting to westerners, like the neba-neba (slimy, sticky, or stringy) texture of okra, junsai (watershield, a pond green covered in a transparent jelly) or natto (fermented soybeans) are beloved in Japan.

You'll also learn a bit about the history of Japanese ingredients in western cooking. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, French and American chefs began going to Japan, and Japanese chefs flocked to France to study and cook. David Bouley recalls the first time he saw soy sauce used by a French chef, by Joel Robuchon at his Saint Germain L'Atelier in Paris. Robuchon combined soy sauce with butter, ginger and lemon juice, a move that must have seemed daring at the time but now seems almost quaint.

Besides Andoh, there are only two other women included, Lee Anne Wong, who gained fame on Top Chef and now heads Koko Head Cafe in Honolulu, and Toni Robertson, Executive Chef of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group in Singapore. Growing up in a family of doctors, to satisfy parental expectations, Robertson became a U.S. Air Force emergency room medic and served in the Air National Guard before turning to cooking. The experience wasn't a waste though. She calls it "perfect training" for professional kitchen work because she learned how to remain calm in the midst of "controlled chaos."

Some of the most tantalizing tidbits involve the chefs' thoughts on individual ingredients. Marcus Samuelsson loves yuzu and smoked fish liver. Wylie Dufresne rhapsodizes about kuro edamame, or black soybeans, which he calls "a higher level of soybean that tastes almost like corn, peanuts, or a little of both," with a black outer skin but "an emerald green bean inside that shines through. When you pop the soybean out of its skin and eat it, it's so delicious and flavorful that you'll never want to go back to the other edamame."

Nobu Matsuhisa highlights the importance of ingenuity and imagination when faced with a lack of ingredients. When he arrived in Lima, Peru as a young man fresh fish was bountiful, but not Japanese ingredients. To approximate Japanese rice he tried mixing local rice with sweet glutinous rice. To come up with a facsimile of Japanese rice vinegar he mixed soy sauce, acetic acid, and then later wine, kombu and salt. Without fresh wasabi, he mixed powdered wasabi with horseradish and some local hot pepper.

Bouley advocates intuitive cooking  "When you cook a dish that you're worried about, I suggest that you rely more on your senses... Stop thinking, because that's going to distract you." He gives the example of learning how to cook onions by paying careful attention to sensory input every step of the way. "What do they smell like they they are cooking and getting sweet?...What do they smell like then they are still full of water? They smell bitter, they smell acidy. Trust your senses and they will not lie to you."

The chapter on Australian chef Ben Flatt, who married his wife Chikako and then worked with her parents at their Noto Peninsula guest house Sannami, is fascinating. Flatt learned Japanese knife techniques, fermentation, pickling and seasonal cooking from his in-laws, and he and Chikako now run an inn and cook "Noto-Italian" cuisine at Flatt's by the Sea. They make 400 litres of ishiri, a fermented squid sauce, a year. One of his dishes involves hinazushi pickled fish that tastes like blue cheese paired with deep-fried flying fish wings and dressed with a mix of sansho leaf, olive oil and sugar.

All of the chefs, not surprisingly, recommend working hard, no matter how lowly your first position in the kitchen turns out to be, adapting to any working condition, and figuring things out on your own. A common criticism of American-trained chefs is that they need to be spoon-fed recipes and techniques, a far cry from the Japanese system, where no one teaches apprentices anything; they are expected to learn by watching how the masters do things.

Yosuke Suga, whose father ran a French restaurant in Nagoya and who worked for ten years as Joel Robuchon's trusted lieutenant, says that as an apprentice and later chef in both Japan and France, "nobody trained me or taught me recipes. I had to observe and absorb them." Today's culinary school grads, he notes, are alway on the lookout for the next best gig. "But even if the chefs are smart and learn the technique in just one year, they cannot learn philosophy or patience...it's difficult to trust them on a deeper level."

In Tokyo, Mixologizing with the Seasons

Gen Yamamoto, ready for business.

One of the best parts of a highlight-filled trip to Tokyo recently was dropping in on Bar Gen Yamamoto. Gen joined David Bouley's New York City team in late 2010 and the following April helped open Brushstroke, Bouley's French-tinged play on kaiseki cuisine. There, he specialized in fruit- and vegetable-based cocktails that were remarkable for their elegance and subtlety. I was a fan in New York, and curious to see what new concoctions the gifted mixologist had up his freshly-pressed sleeve in Tokyo.

He's set up his welcoming eight-seat bar in Azabu-Juban, a neighborhood where remnants of old Japan collide with  embassies, cafes and an international mix of residents. To the delight of his followers, he's also extended his range with a cocktail list that serves as a guide to the agrarian bounty of his native country.

We tried a four-course tasting menu (¥4,200, six-course is ¥5,800) which started with a refreshing mix of cucumber from Ibaraki, Kumamoto cantaloupe, Okinawa hiba-chi pepper, and Kawabe rice shochu. The latter is from a region in Kumamoto Prefecture known for its pristine waters.

 Fruit opener: cucumber, cantaloupe, hiba-chi pepper, rice shochu.

Full of beans: Ehime fava, kinome, junmai ginjo Raifuku.

Excited about the range of produce he has access to from all over Japan, Gen raves about the softness the tomato water he extracts from Ishiyama tomatoes that are now in season. He pays close attention to the condition of each tomato, and depending on variables such as when in the season they are picked and when in the tasting service he places it, he may use one of seven different tomato cocktail recipes. "The main thing is that I'm always looking for improvement and trying to surprise my guests," he says. The one we sampled included both fresh tomato, a housemade confiture of tomato, shiso and Rives Spanish gin. 

Not your mom's bloody Mary: Tomato cocktail

Another of Gen's finds is raw Kumano dogwood honey. The trees' flowers produce enough honey for bees to collect only every four years, resulting in a denseness of flavor that he likes combined with Ehime new summer orange (the flavor of which is somewhere between yuzu, grapefruit and lemon), mint and Torikai rice shochu.

The "dessert" course: summer orange, Kumano honey, mint, rice shochu 

Gen himself brings to mind a latter-day Jeeves, an unflappable master of his trade who never seems to break a sweat. While he is tall and lean, however, his creations are uniquely round and soft. They don't deliver the blunt alcoholic KO that many drinkers seek, but creep up on you in stockinged feet; their impact can therefore come as a surprise at the end of the evening. 

The room Gen has created is remarkable as well, anchored by an beautiful, broad bar fashioned from a 500-year-old Japanese oak (mizunara) tree. Beige walls and minimal adornment complete the setting, making Bar Gen Yamamoto a soothing refuge where you can relax and converse with your fellow guests and host while sampling his quietly astonishing cocktails.

Bar Gen Yamamoto
1-6-4 Azabu-Juban
Minato-ku Tokyo 
03-6434-0652
website: www.genyamamoto.jp

   

I Learn How to Make Tofu and Yuba

Narita sensei lifting a sheet of yuba.

I have never had a burning desire to make my own tofu before, but a tutorial with Mitsuhiro Narita, a professor at the Tsuji Culinary Institute in Osaka, and chef at David Bouley's Tribeca kaiseki restaurant Brushstroke, actually has me contemplating it.

The event, held earlier this week, was the second-to-last Japanese cooking class in a series at the Bouley Test Kitchen just down the street from Brushstroke and Bouley.  The cheerful title of the class was "Egg, Tofu, Yuba and Some More!"

There was a lot more, but the tofu and yuba making was a highlight. Maybe you won't think it's worth the bother, but here's how you do it: Wash and soak soy beans overnight in water in a 1:1 ratio. The larger the beans the better, and if you can get some from Hokkaido you've really got it made. They are the best, according to Narita sensei.

The next day, you turn the whole thing into a paste in a food processor or blender, doing this in batches if necessary. Key warning: Don't taste this paste! Apparently very bad things will happen to your stomach if you do.

Next, put 6 cups of water in a large pot (or if you are changing amounts, 3:1 ratio of water to soybean paste). Bring the water to a boil, or really the first suggestion of a boil, then add the paste and mix it over high heat. There will be a lot of foam or awa, which you will have to keep skimming off. Also make sure you scrape the bottom of the pot as you mix. As soon as the soybean paste water mixture comes to a boil, turn the heat down low and cook for 7 minutes while continuing to skim foam off the top.

Turn the mixture into a cheesecloth lined sieve and squeeze out as much of the liquid as possible.Return the strained liquid to the pot. At this point you can make yuba, the delicious skin of the tofu, by pouring a small amount of the soy milk in a flat pan and heating it at 80 degrees celsius (170 degrees fahrenheit) until a top layer starts to form, just like the skin on heated milk. Lift the layer off with a chopstick and you've got yuba! Narita sensei made a delicious dish of battered, fried soft shell crab with yuba-ankake sauce, the latter made with dashi, mirin, light soy sauce and kudzu powder to thicken it.

Tempura soft-shell crabs with yuba-ankake sauce.

(The soybean mash that's leftover, okara, can be fried up with vegetables and simmered with dashi and mirin for a delicious side dish.)

Gomoku (five-color) okara on the left
 with dashi-maki tamago rolled omelette.

To make tofu, you'll need, nigari, a natural coagulant derived from sea water that consists mostly of magnesium chloride, available in Japanese food markets. For 2 cups of soy beans, use 4 tablespoons, stirred in while the liquid is kept at a steady temperature of 70 celsius (158 degrees fahrenheit.). It works like magic. As soon as you stir in the nigari, the tofu begins to thicken, at which point you turn it out into a strainer lined with cheesecloth and gently squeeze out the excess liquid. The taste is very fresh and unadulterated.

Since there are no preservatives at all in this tofu, it only lasts about a day. To best appreciate your fresh tofu's pure flavors, serve it with a little grated fresh ginger, some chopped scallions, and a little soy sauce.

Not many Japanese people make their own tofu, Narita sensei told us, but recently a machine has come on the market in Japan that makes the process super-easy, with temperature controlled settings similar to a rice cooker. Perhaps this will be the next fad, just like yogurt makers in the '70s, and the current cocktail and paleta-making fads. How about tofu cocktails and yuba pops?

   

How I Learned to Cook Fish with Hiroki Murashima

Professor Murashima and Mr. Muto

Last week I attended a most informative class on cooking fish Japanese style from Hiroki Murashima, an assistant professor of Japanese cooking at the Tsuji Culinary Institute in Osaka, Japan. The evening was part of a series put on at the Bouley Test Kitchen, Chef David Bouley's Tribeca laboratory for culinary brainstorming and experimentation.

Before the learning started: Sesame tofu with uni, and some plum wine.

It's a smart idea: Bouley is capitalizing on the presence of a highly-trained team of Japanese chefs, in town now to staff his kaiseki restaurant Brushstroke. Murashima-sensei was humble, relying on his impressive cooking skills to do the talking. Translator and Bouley Japan liaison, Japanese journalist Yoshiharu Muto, supplied patter, jokes and additional tips, hints and arcana.They managed to pack a lot of information into a two-hour class, and turned out more delicious food than any of us were anticipating. 

Before you even get started on cooking the fish we learned there are a few must-do steps: 

• Never use fish as is from the fish monger. First wash it, then treat it to a fine shower of sea salt--not for flavoring, but to remove its fishy smell and seal its juices in. 
• Leave it for about 30-40 minutes, or an hour for more oily fish. 
• Wipe or wash off the salt with either water or sake, then blot it dry with paper towels
• Score the skin side of the fish to let the marinade or seasonings penetrate its surface.

Yuzu-marinated Spanish mackerel.

Murashima sensei guided us through various preparations, for a yuzu-marinated Spanish mackerel, sake lees-marinated grilled salmon, miso-marinated black cod, simmered black cod, steamed tilefish with scallions, and a lightly vinegared fish salad.

The Spanish mackerel was done Yuan-yaki style, teriyaki-like flavoring that dates back to its inventor, an 18th-century monk and tea master. First, Murashima-sensei marinated the fish in a mix of sake, mirin, and koikuchi (dark) soy sauce spiked with yuzu and lime. Mr. Muto, who threw in interesting nuggets of information of his own, informed us that the darker soy sauce is actually is actually less salty than usukuchi (light) soy sauce. Since it tends to darken the fish, Kyoto cooks prefer the lighter-colored style.

I loved how Murashima-sensei improvised with his accompaniments on this dish. Since the traditional seasonal fresh bamboo shoots and kinome (pepper leaf) were not availalabe here, he substituted hearts of palm, fresh basil and a light mustard sauce. To drink, there was Hakkaisan Junmai Ginjo from Niigata.

Steamed tilefish with egg white and black truffle

One of my favorite dishes was the simmered black cod dredged in cake flour, fried, then simmered in a hot pot with burdock root, green asparagus and grated daikon in a soy, sugar and mirin sauce. But perhaps the most refined was this bowl of tilefish, scallops and wakame, which Murashima-sensei capped with whipped egg white and bits of black truffle before oven steaming and then topping with julienned shin shoga, the prized fresh young ginger shoot.  

Brustroke Kaiseki, Chef's Pass at Bouley

Two nights ago, I had the chance to visit Brushstroke, the very Japanese Tribeca kaiseki restaurant from chef David Bouley, in collaboration with the Tsuji Cooking Academy in Osaka, Japan. The joint effort goes back 18 years, when Bouley first met Tsuji presidentYoshiki Tsuji, whose father founded the school and authored the seminal Japanese cookbook Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art. In order to bring the spirit of Japanese cuisine to New York, professors from the academy, kitchen equipment, ingredients and ideas have wended their way from Japan to Tribeca, making Brushstroke possibly the most authentic Japanese dining experience you can have in New York City at the moment.

Bouley says the collaboration is an extension of the way he’s always thought about cooking. The Japanese like him, he noted, because he’s a farmer at heart and he’s been doing seasonally driven kaiseki-style dinners since 1985, when he served 12- and 15-course small plate dinners on  custom-made Limoges china.

The Brushstroke space (formerly Danube), designed by the Japanese firm Super Potato and its lead designer Takashi Sugimoto, is a honeyed, mellow space, one wall of which is composed of the page-ends of 2,500 books stacked in criss-cross patterns and tinted to mimic the natural striations of wood. Chef Isao Yamada and mixologist Gen Yamamoto are creating exciting dishes and drinks that feel cutting edge modern but with the fanatic attention to detail and technique of the best Japanese restaurants. Among the dishes we sampled: “stinky” and creamy fermented tofu; truffled chawan-mushi (savory egg custard) with sea urchin; lobster claw tempura with two kinds of salt, curry and green tea, and a selection of pristinely fresh sushi. 

The clean, clear flavors extend to Brushstroke's cocktail menu as well, where heirloom tomatoes, grapefruit, ginger and green peas have all found their way into Yamamoto’s inspired cocktails. My grape tomato concoction was a beautiful shade of pink-red, subtle and delicious.

Chef's Pass, photo by Nicole Bartelme

Back at Bouley, I got a peek at a room called the “Chef’s Pass.” In the process of expanding his kitchen space, the chef created a wondrous, salon-like room decorated with the kinds of gorgeous antique, artisanal and one-of-a-kind finds that he seems to amass in his sleep (he and chef Jody Williams are alike that way). The novelty is the 65-inch flat screen TV, where private dining groups can partake of their dinner while conversing, via Skype, with the purveyors who supply Bouley: master saké brewers in Japan, vintners and cheese makers in France and farmers in the Catskills or the Berkshires. Tours cheese maker Rodolphe Le Meunier, Meilleur Ouvrier de France (the highest honor awarded artisans in France), is such a good sport he’ll get up at 4 a.m. to chat with Bouley diners and explain his methods.

Chef's Pass allows Bouley to educate his patrons while feeding them in style, to introduce the hard-working farmers and craftspeople who make his kind of restaurant possible. Yet the chef takes a jaundiced view of the current “farm-to-table” movement, saying, “it’s what farmers have been doing for ten generations where I grew up in New England." While this "reinvention" of age old practices is nothing new, "it's a good thing," he adds, because it brings home the message that "people should not underestimate the value of the farmer."

David Bouley's apple foyer

In pursuit of another story recently, I had the chance to sit down with David Bouley, the brilliantly creative chef who has staked out a corner of Tribeca as his own laboratory for refined French fare, pretty patisserie products, Austrian explorations and authentic Japanese food. His downtown empire is constantly in a state of flux, so the tiny space that used to be called “Upstairs” will become Bouley Studio and the former French-Italian hybrid Secession (in an even older incarnation, it was the Austro-Hungarian Danube)  will soon open as Brushstroke, a kaiseki and sushi restaurant done in collaboration with Japan’s Tsuji Culinary Institute in Osaka.

The chef had just returned from Japan and was raving about the fantastic vegetables he encountered in Kyoto: turnips, carrots, daikon, cabbages and round eggplants. “Kyoto eggplants are the best,” he told me, “you can eat them like an apple.” Of course he brought back seeds and will try to grow them here in New York. We shared a moment of worry about the Tohoku earthquake, and the chef reckoned that the record closeness of the moon to the earth at the time could have been a factor in that natural disaster.

Walking through the Brushstroke as it was being readied to open felt like being in a  Japanese woodworker’s atelier: the long, narrow room was filled with rough-hewn wood set at asymmetrical angles, glowing light and busy Japanese workers. The artisans and many of the materials for the restaurant are from Japan, and the room (like the food, I hope) promises to be stunning.

But what I really wanted to show you was the famous foyer to the flagship Bouley. In the restaurant’s first incarnation of the late ’80s, a dreamy country-French maison filled with flowers, the chef placed crates of apples in the entrance. According to Bouley, they, like so much of what he does, harked back to his childhood in Connecticut. Bouley explains, “The apples and quinces smelled so good at my grandmother’s farm. My brothers and my sister and I used to hide among the quinces, and my mother and my grandmother both put quinces in with the sheets and towels. We grew up with that, and having a real connection to what was happening outdoors.”

The tradition of always having fresh apples in his restaurant foyer, however, actually began as a mistake. The chef had gone to the theater and in his haste, left some crates of apples there. When he returned, the scent was so magical that they became a fixture. At the current Bouley—more sumptuously attired in rich silks and velvets, and hung with vibrant paintings of the southern French countryside—the foyer presentation, too, has undergone a makeover. Bouley had high-tech stainless steel shelving constructed for his apples, 3,900 in all. But it is the foyer during the fall Concord grape season that really makes people stop in their tracks, says Bouley, as they take in the rich, musky scent with amazement. “They step in, they stop, and they just look around,” he says. That alone is worth a trip come October.