washoku– tag –

Most of It Was Never Eaten: A History of Himono, Japan's Dried Fish For most of Japanese history, the dried fish that mattered went into the soil, onto ships bound for China, and before the gods. The soft, glistening fillet on today's breakfast tray is the newest thing in the story, and it is hardly dried at all. Pi...

The Rice Ball That Wasn't: Onigiri and Two Thousand Years of Food You Can Hold Japan's oldest rice ball is not quite a rice ball. Its seaweed wrapper only became the norm about a century ago, and its triangle was standardized by the convenience-store industry. The one thing that has lasted is the hand. In November 1...

Summer on the Plate: Coolness as a Thing You Cook Japanese summer food is not simply food that happens to be cold. It is an engineered response to heat — a vegetable named for the wrong season, a fish eaten at its worst moment for reasons that have nothing to do with flavour, and a table where the bowl is chosen bef...

What Japan Actually Registered: Washoku and the UNESCO Misunderstanding In 2013, "washoku" joined UNESCO's list of humanity's intangible heritage. Almost everyone assumes this means sushi, tempura, and ramen were honored. What was actually inscribed is something quieter, stranger, and far more interesting. On Decemb...

A Year at the Japanese Table: Eating Through the Twenty-Four Sekki Japan divides the year into twenty-four seasons, each about two weeks long. Walk through them in order and you are no longer reading a calendar — you are eating one. Most of the world eats by four seasons, and loosely at that. Japan keeps a finer clo...

Katsuramuki: The Cut That Measures a Cook A single daikon, peeled into one continuous, paper-thin sheet longer than a person is tall. It sounds like a party trick. In a Japanese kitchen, it is closer to a verdict. Watch a trained Japanese cook perform katsuramuki and the first thing you notice is how little seems to...

The Box That Traveled: A History of the Japanese Bento From dried rice carried into medieval battlefields to a convenience-store lunch and a rice ball shaped like a cartoon face, the bento is a thousand-year record of a single, quietly persistent idea: that a meal should be able to go with you. Almost every culture ...

Frying as Restraint: Tempura and the Art of the Light Touch Deep-frying is usually an act of addition — batter, richness, weight. Japanese tempura is the opposite: a technique whose entire purpose is to take moisture away and leave the ingredient more itself than before. There is a moment, at a good tempura counter,...

Types of Miso: White, Red & Awase Explained Everyone learns the shorthand: white miso is sweet, red miso is salty. It's true enough to be useful — and it explains nothing. The interesting question is why the same three ingredients divide into pale and dark, mild and deep, in the first place. Stand in front of th...

The Noodle That Asks Nothing of You: Udon and the Comfort of Wheat Soba is defined by what it lacks — gluten, and the difficulty that absence creates. Udon is defined by the opposite: gluten is its whole reason for being, and everything worth knowing about it flows from that one fact. There is a particular kind of c...

Sushi vs Sashimi: What's Actually the Difference? The short answer is one word: rice. But the more interesting question is why Japan gave a name — and the status of a complete dish — to something as apparently simple as a slice of raw fish. Ask ten people what the difference between sushi and sashimi is, and most wi...

Sake for Beginners: How to Choose Your First Bottle The hardest part of drinking sake is not drinking it — it is standing in front of a shelf of unfamiliar bottles and having no idea where to begin. The good news is that a few simple ideas will take you most of the way there. There is a particular feeling that comes...