Food feeds the body, but cooking for other people feeds human connections.
Japanese food
Posted inCulture, Food, Nonfiction, Quotes
A Pilgrimage to MSG Mecca
A fan of MSG visits the world’s largest producer of this contentious flavor-enhancing agent.
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Japanese Origins of Modern Fine Dining
How kaiseki — Japan’s formal dining tradition — became a major (though often unacknowledged) influence on modern haute cuisine.
Posted inArts & Culture, Nonfiction, Quotes
Themed for Success
At Eater, journalist Emily Yoshida hits some of Tokyo’s absurd, popular tourist attractions trying to understand specifically what themed-destinations offer and why they’re so popular.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Lost in Japan
Sarah Miller travels to Japan to learn more about sochu, and ends up learning more about her own limitations as a traveler.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Guatemalan Chef Who Became a Hiroshima Comfort Food Star
Matt Goulding follows the origin story of okonomiyaki, the harmoniously messy pancake that has become a staple of post-war Hiroshima cuisine.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
What Goes into Japan’s Famous Powdered Green Tea
Matcha ─ you’ve read about its health benefits, you’ve seen it in chic cafes sold as bright green lattes and iridescent bubble teas. Consumed in Japan since the 12th century, it’s suddenly trending in America. So what is it and where does it come from? In Serious Eats, food writer Matthew Amster-Burton provides a rare look […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
How Okinawans Eat
I have long taken an interest in how I might eat myself to old age. I visited the southern Japanese Okinawa islands whose population is said to include the largest proportion of centenarians in the country and met with some of them in what is supposedly the village with the oldest demographic in the world, […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Getting to Know Japanese Dashi Stock
“Dashi is like the key actor in a movie,” says 83-year-old Chobei Yagi, whose 275-year-old store, Tokyo’s Yagicho Honten, specializes in katsuobushi and other dried foods. “But dashi always plays the supporting role, never the star.” Most katsuobushi today comes pre-sliced in plastic bags, which is convenient and allows one to make dashi from scratch […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Gaijin Who Makes Great Ramen
As a ramen maniakku or enthusiast myself, I reread Lucky Peach‘s debut Ramen Issue once a year. The issue has an essay by chef Ivan Orkin, where he tells what it was like operating a ramen restaurant in Japan, as a gaijin, or outsider. Lucky Peach is a food quarterly started by chef David Chang and writer Peter Meehan in 2011. The […]