1 item forgotten in that list: fresh, tasty ingredients.
Japanese produce and meats are just fussed over to such a degree for which an American consumer has no frame of reference.
The fruit and veg tend to be larger, less bruised / browned, and overall of better taste. As ingredients this makes for better food. Perhaps less commercialized farming? IDK.
They do spend a larger portion of their household income on groceries, so this is part of the answer.
Edit: By "larger" I don't mean serving size, I mean natural size of the fruit and veg. I lived in Japan for 15+ years. The produce there compared to the produce in my US Trader Joe's, was larger. And tastier. I don't know how they did it, because I too would have assumed that larger meant less tasty. Coming back to the US and seeing scrawny fruit was a shock. I wonder if the US producers are sending their largest / best overseas? Or perhaps TJ's and Fred Meyer is buying B class produce?
This is certainly false, as few heritage fruit and vegetable breeds approach the size of their commercial counterparts. Larger isn't better most of the time though, and smaller versions tend to haver stronger, more intense taste.
Coming from Italy, I'm always amazed how large US tomatoes/zucchini/eggplants/etc are, and those big, watery vegetables are almost always tasteless in comparison.
I think it's a combination of selecting varieties that produce bigger fruit, as well as waiting longer to pick, so as to produce the largest (most water-heavy) produce.
"Coming from Italy, I'm always amazed how large US tomatoes/zucchini/eggplants/etc are, and those big, watery vegetables are almost always tasteless in comparison."
From Melbourne, @SamBam what do think is the reason?
My own personal observation, growing both Roma and large Beaf steak variety tomatoes in a home plot, is it's a combination of cultivar and heat. I agree on variety chosen. The commercial varieties are combinations of size, colour, season and preservation. Not necessarily taste. So it maybe the sugar content.
Leave the tomatoes in that sun, pick them when they are ripe and the taste is there. Back at the supermarket, picked early and cooled... not so much flavour.
Don't remember the size of Japanese tomatoes. I suspect they are probably similarly sized otherwise I'd have some sort of feeling about them.
I only saw zucchini for sale once in Japan and, for what is nearly a prolific weed -- can hardly give away all zucchinis if you have one plant, the zucchini cost like $10 a piece so I refused to buy them.
The most commonly sold variety of eggplant in Japan is the Italian type which is hardly sold in the US and naturally smaller than the US standard regular / classic type. So not really comparable.
Cucumber variety is also different. The US normally sells straight 8 type. The Japan variety is, I think, a Japanese cucumber and a different type. So not comparable.
The problem is less commercial growing and breeding and more that US consumers have no notion of seasonality, and will happily buy asparagus in September and tomatoes in March. It doesn't help that Italy has a longer tomato growing season than most of the US.
>The problem is less commercial growing and breeding and more that US consumers have no notion of seasonality, and will happily buy asparagus in September and tomatoes in March.
I mean, in our defense, if we actually ate mostly or only what was in season locally, we would mostly live on squash, beans, bread, and potatoes. Real, tasty vegetables are just plain difficult to grow across much of the country, and shipping from the places with easy growing to the places with difficult growing brings in all the tradeoffs of trucked produce.
It's not actually false, but you are also not wrong :-) I will explain. Japan has a very different agriculture system from most places I've lived in. After WWII a million people died of starvation. Japan had very poor food distribution practices in place and had been importing nearly everything. When the Americans blockaded Japan, they literally starved. Even when the occupying forces started to distribute food, it was impossible to get it out to the starving people.
The US occupation of Japan was remarkable in many ways and they made many laws which are still on the books (including the bizarre pornography laws that still exist here!). Japanese culture is such that people don't tend to question authority and so they will follow the law even if they think it is strange. Many of the really good laws in Japan were put in place during the occupation, but they are things that you would never be able to get away with in most other countries. The current agriculture system is one of those things.
What they did was mandate that designated farm land could never change designation. So it is illegal to build on farm land. They also made it illegal to sell farm land. The only time farm land is for sale in Japan is when the owning family dies out. The resulting sale has really complicated rules which I don't understand. The result of this is that all farms are small and they are owned by a wide variety of families. The modern factory farm basically just doesn't exist here (except up in Hokkaido where there is a lot more room -- and I think people are farming on non-farm designated land).
In addition to this, they set up a food distribution monopoly. This food distribution monopoly was mandated to distribute food locally. The intent was to have many, many small farms making many, many different products and to have very good distribution from the farms to cities -- because all produce is local. This created an incredibly robust (if inefficient from a price perspective) production and distribution system.
The third piece of the puzzle is that they made the import of all essential food products illegal. Although due to external pressures this is very much relaxed now, it is still illegal to import rice for anything other than glue manufacture, for instance (although possibly it is legal now for alcohol production... I can't remember). This allowed the distribution monopoly to dictate prices that would allow local production to continue.
This system works fantastically well. Many foreigners are skeptical (and frustrated with their inability to trade -- a fact that constantly amuses me given that it was set up by the US in the first place). However, I live in the country side. When I go to the grocery store the food in it is grown by my neighbours. They even write the farmer's name on the bags of produce (and even have a picture of them!) Some food is grown one or two prefectures away. A very small amount (like dairy products) is produced in places like Hokkaido. Only recently have I started seeing produce from other places in the world.
What has this to do with the topic? I'm glad you asked! Produce is picked fresh and put in the store that day or the next day. I know this because the JA (now a private semi-monopoly food distributor) is down the road from me. Anybody can go in and watch them work (farmers are going in an out of there all the time).
So when you have tomatoes, for example, they are red when they are picked. They go to the JA, sit for a couple of hours and then go to the store. The store holds produce on average for 2-3 days, apparently. Fruit is sweet because it is ripe. It also doesn't last. Many foreigners are surprised when they buy a basket of strawberries and it is rotten in 2 days.
So even though Japanese farmers choose to grow larger varieties, the produce in the store is dramatically better than the produce you normally find in grocery stores around the world.
The other thing is that fruit and vegetables are expensive. Normally I think it's nearly twice as expensive as what I was used to in Canada. What this means is that for fruit production, they often limit yield. Not only that, but they do things like manually tie paper bags around fruit when it is growing so that it does not get eaten by birds. When they grow melons (one of the specialties of my area), the farmer gets up every day and turns them so that the sugar is evenly distributed through the whole melon (if you don't do this, the side that was nearest the ground is dramatically sweeter -- you can test this yourself by cutting a melon in half and tasting it blindfolded). Production is very, very small and prices are very, very high so they can do this kind of thing that would be crazy anywhere else.
For the very best fruit, the farmers charge insane prices. The best apple from a crop of apples will be sold for upwards of $10 US -- for a single apple. Melons can go for as much as $100 US. A perfect bunch of grapes, picked at the perfect time can be $20.
I have friends who own businesses and thanks to the gift culture in Japan, they often receive these super-fruits from their farmer customers. Since they receive more than they can eat, I sometimes benefit from a re-gift (also part of the wonderful Japanese gift culture). I seriously have never eaten fruit like this before -- even from a home grown garden. These farmers are professionals and it shows in their work.
So you are correct, but are discounting the impact that the Japanese agricultural system has on the produce. It would be interesting to see what would happen if the Japanese people would get over their obsession of big fruit. I can't imagine how delicious they could make good varieties.
I've recently visited Japan and food was one of my main topics of interest. What I realized is that food is very expensive, especially meat, cheese and vegetables. Bread is weird, too fluffy and soft for my taste. So, as a consequence, they mostly focus on rice and noodles. Very little potato in their cuisine, as well.
I live in Romania. By comparison, Romania has cheaper food, and much of it is tastier, including: meat, and especially smoked pork meat, cheese - you have to taste Romanian cheese from the mountains, it just doesn't compare to the poor examples of cheese I found in Japan. Our breads are 100 times better, you can find anything - long, short, round, crunchy, fluffy, with brown flower, multi flowers, seeds, anything really, except the Japanese originals: "mellon bread", "curry bread" and "anpan".
Bottled water tastes better in Romania, but Japanese tap water is amazing (never seen such good tap water, I drunk from the faucet). Romanian beer is much tastier too - I suppose it's because of better water. Wine - well, Japanese wines from the market are bad, and expensive. In my country I can find wine tasting 10 times better at a quarter of the price. Sake - I tried it but I don't like the taste much. Pickled vegetables - well, I would say we're even on this domain - Japanese have their own, pickled ginger and such, Romania has its own, usually cucumbers, peppers, cabbage, cauliflower and mellon (so tasty, pickled mellon).
So I'd give Japan a good grade overall, the food is tasty but different, mostly rice and noodles, very expensive, and in many domains lacking by comparison to food I know from my country. What I liked the most are - bento boxes, udon, mochi daifuku (very interesting tactile sensation), sushi and tempura.
It sounds like you mostly tried to compare the food in Japan with the food you have at home (obviously as you need a frame of reference), but I think the food the Japanese excel at really just doesn't have an equivalent in Romanian cuisine, so it's hard to compare.
Bread just isn't eaten that much in Japan, so obviously it's not as good as in Romania (which is once again far behind bread from Germany or France). Cheese is another product that just isn't quite as popular in Japan (in most of Asia for that matter, which is probably due to an overall much higher percentage of people with lactose intolerance) and doesn't have the same history and cultural significance cheese and other milk products have in Europe.
The sushi you get in Japan (and many other fish dishes for that matter) is far and beyond anything you could find in Romania for comparison, which is once again because fish just hasn't played the same important role in the history of Romanian food.
Yakitori is maybe something you can compare, because you find a lot of grilled goods at corner bistros in Romania as well and usually the quality in Japan is far beyond what you can get in Romania.
Ultimately what I'm getting at is that most countries probably excel at some foods and not at others. The further they are apart geographically and culturally the harder it gets to compare them I think.
Unless you go very much out of your way, it is hard to find European style bread of any kind of quality in Japan. Cheese is the same (although Hokkaido produces some very nice camembert style cheeses). Japanese wine, as you say, is almost uniformly horrible. The main problem, I think, is that they only started planting vinifera grapes about 10 years ago. There are a couple of decent wine producers in Yamanashi prefecture, but their good wines are very expensive (and the ones I've managed to try are not that good).
It is very unfortunate that you found sake (nihonshu is what it is normally called -- sake just refers to any alcohol in Japan) not to be of your liking. There are thousands of nihonshu producers in Japan and the flavours range really dramatically. It can be sweet or dry, fruity or flowery. Not everybody likes it though.
I've never had Romanian beer, but I have heard that it is excellent. Japanese mainstream lagers are better than most mainstream Euro lagers, but not by any great margin. The higher quality mainstream lagers (Suntory The Premium Malts, Ebisu, and Kirin Ichiban Shibori) are all decent versions of German lager styles. Suntory has a cheaper "Malts" brand which is actually quite a good Munchner Helles IMHO. But as you say, it's nothing to write home about. Ji-beeru (micro brewery beer) is where it is at, but the movement is still in its infancy. There are many, many really excellent hefeweizen beers, but microbreweries are mostly concentrating on crazy styles.
Pickles... Don't get me started on pickles :-) Japanese pickles are awesome. They are also really regional, so if you are interested in pickles it pays to travel around to many small cities to try them. It's kind of unfortunate that many of the best pickles are quite hard to buy, but you should be able to get a decent variety at various omiyage shops.
If you come back again, it helps quite a bit to travel outside of the big cities. For example, it is really unusual to spend more than about 700 yen (7 US dollars) on a meal at a restaurant around where I live. And there is no tipping. Like many places in Europe, the best food is often found in the izakayas (bar/pub). In these places you eat otsumami (finger food???) while you are drinking. Apart from formal meals, this epitomises Japanese cuisine in my mind. The main things you will find are sashimi, yakitori, grilled fish, deep fried everything, and various kinds of stews.
It's really unfortunate, but it's quite difficult for travellers to experience the cuisine of Japan without having a guide who knows the area. I suppose this might also be true of Romania!
Yes. That's one of the ji-biiru brands. To be honest, I've never had it because I've never seen it in Shizuoka. I always find it funny that they sell outside of the country, but not everywhere in Japan. Because I like ale my go to small breweries are Yo-Ho in Nagano (truly awesome) and Coedo. In Shizuoka there is Baird Beer, which was started by an American -- their beers are too big for me, but they are nice. For German style beers, Gotemba Kogen Beer is very nice, though some of their better beers are seasonal and often not available. In Fujinomia there is a brewery set up by a German guy which is really, really good, but his beers are harder to get than hen's teeth. Unfortunately, living as I do in the countryside, ji-biiru is impossible to get on tap and I have to make do with whatever the super markets and convenience stores bring in.
Way to represent Japanese food mikekchar. In what countryside are you residing. I could point you to some fantastic wine producers here. But, like everything, quality comes at a price.
I'm in Shizuoka. I would be eternally grateful for pointers to good wine producers. Hoping to do a wine tour in the next few months, so getting an idea of places to visit that are likely to produce good wine would be fantastic.
> The fruit and veg tend to be larger, less bruised / browned, and overall of better taste.
I disagree about the size & appearance. I wouldn't say this means the veggie would be more tasty. But I definitely agree on the taste part.
This is something I found in common between French and Japanese cuisine: Simplicity, but very good quality ingredients. (maybe this is why there's so many 3 Michelin stars in Japan)
In the US I would say it's hard to enjoy good French/Japanese for that reason. On the contrary, it's easier to enjoy the cuisines which relies more on spices, such as Indian cuisine, because those spices taste good everywhere.
Thinking about my "size" comment more. Some anecdotal observations:
Asian pears : Japan softball sized, US hardball sized
Carrots : US carrots are hard to cut Japanese style (really is just julienned) because they are so narrow at the fat end. Roll around on the cutting board like a marble. US carrot about the thickness of my thumb. Japan carrots were fat like a silver dollar and were easier to slice into stackable sheets.
Apples : I liked the cheaper apples (Fuji) in Japan. Weirdly the more expensive ones were less tasty and larger. The Fuji's probably size-wise same as the US.
Grapes (the expensive hot house types) : Japan's were sized like a small plum.
Strawberries : seemed more uniformly large. Still damn tasty.
Comparing asian pear to American pear is like an apples to oranges comparison. They are of different family altogether.
Anyway, my reasoning for the taste difference is pretty simple and obvious really. US fruits and vegetables are predominantly of GMO and it's not the same type of fruits and veggies as several decades ago. It's a sad state really.
Actually I am comparing an Asian pear purchased in Japan to an Asian pear purchased in the US. I did a little dance of joy to discover Trader Joe's sometimes carried the Asian pear, despite the pear being so small.
>Apples : I liked the cheaper apples (Fuji) in Japan. Weirdly the more expensive ones were less tasty and larger. The Fuji's probably size-wise same as the US.
Visit New England or the Pacific Northwest in the September-to-late-October apple season before claiming Japan is superior in apples. Hell no they ain't.
Much French cuisine is built around coaxing flavor from inexpensive/undesirable ingredients. Expensive haute cuisine has little to do with the baguette, stew, stocks, etc., of regular food.
The natural size of the fruit/vegetables here are exaggerated when you go to a normal supermarket. Chain supermarkets only sell visually appealing fruits and vegetables. Throwbacks go into juices, restaurants, and B-grade supermarkets, where you can buy a 5 kilo bag of "misshaped" carrots for a few hundred yen.
The taste also seems to be standardized. For example, I prefer the carrots you can buy in the US to those you find in Japan. Japanese supermarket variety carrots have a much milder flavor than those I've had in other countries.
Standardization is a key word in Japanese society ensuring a certain type of quality at a cost.
> Japanese produce and meats are just fussed over to such a degree for which an American consumer has no frame of reference.
The Japanese are famous for high quality Kobe beef, but the truth is most meat in Japan is actually not very high quality at all and Kobe is a relatively rare exception. Same with poultry. Most people don't want to believe it but, despite all the McDonald's and factory farming, America has the best meat on average, and at maximum too.
Not sure where you are getting your information- sources would back up your claims.
Japanese restaurants can serve high-quality chicken raw. Japanese eggs are eaten raw by a majority of Japanese. This would be unthinkable in the salmonella-filled chicken foodstream of the US.
Eggs are routinely eaten raw in the US as well, and pose a negligible risk of salmonella.
Japan breeds special chickens for raw consumption; no matter how you raise them, ordinary chickens --- including those eaten cooked in Japan --- are nasty animals that will make you sick if not handled properly.
Even in ordinary chickens, intact whole muscles should be internally sterile (it's the skin that's the problem on a trimmed chicken), so I wonder if part of the deal with getting a license to serve chicken tartare or sashimi in Japan is that there's a scald step or something to clear the surface bacteria.
I don't, like, know, or anything. I just like talking about chicken.
>Japan breeds special chickens for raw consumption
Are you sure about this? I've always heard from izakaya owners here that it has to do with the processing of the meat and the amount of time that has passed since slaughter. It's also rarely seared when I get it.
I'm not saying it's seared. Before you do a long cook sous vide, if you're concerned about lactobacillus (which won't hurt you but will make your entire product taste and smell like dirty socks), you can very quickly dunk whatever you're cooking in boiling water to kill surface bacteria. Doing that has no discernible impact on the texture or appearance of the meat (except it might turn a thin layer of chicken flesh opaque).
I'm wondering if the raw chicken people might do something similar, since all the pathogens they're concerned about will be on the surface.
I assert that anyone who has visited Argentina or Uruguay would strongly disagree with you that any country in North America would outperform their beef in flavor.
I would easily be disproven if you had some kind of authoritative source.
I would agree with your assertion that Japanese beef is not high-quality compared to Australian or U.S. meat. I think the parent poster was talking about produce, though.
> I assert that anyone who has visited Argentina or Uruguay
I have not myself been to either of these places but know several knowledgable people who have who all say the beef was fine but not as good as American.
> I would easily be disproven if you had some kind of authoritative source.
Check out the movie http://steakrevolution.com/ (it's available on Netflix as well). They talk extensively about why American beef is the best, but when it comes to comparing it to South American beef (including Brazilian) it basically has to do with climate, and what cattle need to be bred for that climate.
> I would agree with your assertion that Japanese beef is not high-quality compared to Australian or U.S. meat. I think the parent poster was talking about produce, though.
Seems you don't know anything about beef if you are talking about Kobe beef. It's just like Bordeaux Wine, it's beef from a certain region ... it says nothing about quality.
Try Miyazaki Beef next time you are in Japan ...
http://www.rareedibles.com/miyazaki-beef/
Then we can talk. It depends on how you define best. Honestly, Japan has on average the best food, the maximum too (see michelin star restaurants). Average food in US sucks (I think you mean US when talking about America...).
Thanks, but you know that Miyazaki is just a region as well right? And Miyachiku Co-Op is made up of hundreds of different breeders (and does not encompass all Miyazaki beef). And I've had it. It tastes roughly the same as Kobe, despite being a different breed. Most Wagyu tastes the same, honestly, there's as much variation between samples of the same type as there are between different types.
Even for a relatively defined palate, it's very difficult to tell the difference between anything above a grade 6 in marbling. But really, we're talking about a very specific kind of beef, and I have no problem admitting that most Wagyu is very high quality. But it's not representative of most of the beef in Japan.
Japan's Michelin Stars are almost exclusively for Sushi and other seafood, which I would never imply is low quality. If you love seafood, which I don't, then yes, Japan probably has a good claim for the best food in the world.
What about Hida? Not as well known in the US but many believe it's better than Kobe beef.
Japanese style beef is just different than the types found abroad. Every piece of Japanese raised beef I see in the supermarket here is beautifully marbled with fat and extremely rich in flavor. High quality Australian and American beef are also imported but are used for different purposes and lack the white flecks of fat.
> What about Hida? Not as well known in the US but many believe it's better than Kobe beef.
I've had Hida and a few others as well, and found them all to be basically the same. Extremely negligible differences that are similar in magnitude to different servings of the same style of beef.
> Japanese style beef is just different than the types found abroad. Every piece of Japanese raised beef I see in the supermarket here is beautifully marbled with fat and extremely rich in flavor. High quality Australian and American beef are also imported but are used for different purposes and lack the white flecks of fat.
Totally agree, I would never want a full Kobe steak! Way too rich. But for a few bites it is quite good. But still does not beat a good NY strip in my opinion.
Nope, they ban GMOs. And nothing ridiculous about it either.
Even if fears are wrong, GMOs are used to create bottom of the barrel, mass market consumption food.
They are for crops to be yield faster, fend against diseases etc, become bigger, and general give cheaper mass quantities -- that is, meant for the same kind of producers that pile in pesticides, hormones, etc, and create stuff to look big and shiny (sometimes due to added food colouring) on supermarket shelves -- not exactly known for their carefully produced fruits and vegetables.
Rooting for GMOs is like cheering because one eats fast food, or smokes cigarettes, just because there's food science involved in making them more addictive...
In terms of your fast food analogy: the study of molecular gastronomy could be used for making addictive food but can also be used to make breakthroughs in high end cuisine.
There's no reason why GMO can't be used to make good produce even better.
That's the red herring argument, analogous to "think of the children" when it comes to privacy.
Invariably, such better yields are not done out of some corporate goodness of heart to save people from malnutricion. The companies would rather pocket the profits from lower production costs and sell the produce at the same price or close...
In fact the savings from more resistant fruits and vegetables, are offset a lot from high prices to sell seeds, and exclusive rights to GMO seeds.
The same way drugs that cost little to produce (research and approval process included -- when the company has already recouperated and brings in mucho dinero from them) are still not allowed to be sold near cost in Africa and other such place, despite the potential to save millions of people, because profits.
i.e: let's get them to accept our generous "free" (as in beer) GMO and lax their GMO laws/attitudes, so that we can control farming with our licensed seeds.
Potrykus has enabled golden rice to be distributed free to subsistence farmers.[51] Free licenses for developing countries were granted quickly due to the positive publicity that golden rice received, particularly in Time magazine in July 2000.[52] Monsanto Company was one of the first companies to grant free licences.[53]
The cutoff between humanitarian and commercial use was set at US$10,000. Therefore, as long as a farmer or subsequent user of golden rice genetics does not make more than $10,000 per year, no royalties need to be paid. In addition, farmers are permitted to keep and replant seed.[54]
Might be better phrased as "the building blocks of high-end Japanese cuisine" - as the article says, its recommendations for products are far fancier than even Japanese households use in their day-to-day cooking. But certainly an interesting read - I did not know that Japanese fish sauce other than dashi was even a thing, and the insight into the various varieties of soy sauce was pretty cool.
> The finest artisanal Japanese soy sauces are becoming known abroad as shoyu.
Good soy sauce is being called the Japanese word for soy sauce - shoyu (which includes good and bad soy sauce)? If this is true, let's not encourage this language to spread. This is too confusing.
There is exactly one way to determine good from bad shoyu - long term natural fermentation. Good shoyu is fermented for at least 1 year. Better shoyu is fermented for 2 years. Top class shoyu is fermented for 3 or more years. It is literally that easy.
This is also shared by miso (although there are styles of miso that have a short fermentation, so it's not universal). The difference between 1 year old miso and 2 year old miso is profound.
Finally, note that high quality shoyu and miso must be fermented for integer values of years because the temperature variations are extremely important to its maturation. I've often wondered if there would be an advantage to controlling this fermentation with temperature control, but it appears not. All of the top quality shoyu and miso that I know about is made in very "rustic" environments.
Anyway, so there is no need to attach strange labelling to these products. Just do exactly the same as the Japanese do - "naturally fermented for x years". If "naturally fermented" is missing, then be suspicious. If it says "fermented for x months" then be suspicious. If it says nothing at all, then be doubly suspicious.
Well, it is kind of like using the word ketchup to refer to only premium ketchups in some other language. Whenever a person who speaks that language says they enjoy ketchup, you wonder - what are they talking about.
As for artisanal, if there isn't an apprentice program for producing the good, then it probably isn't artisanal. Interestingly, by this definition there are artisanal soy sauces.
Funny enough, the word ketchup comes from Southeast Asian/southern Chinese fermented fish sauce. After it became popular among European sailors after 1600, the word was coopted to refer to a wide variety of different sauces, because Europeans didn’t have any idea how to make the original sauce. The modern American ketchup is a descendent of a descendent of a cheap European knockoff of expensive imported Chinese fish sauce. :-)
Indeed. Unless they are grating the wasabi in front of you, you should assume it is colored horseradish. (Unless you're at a 2 or 3 Michelin-starred sushi restaurant in Japan- then it's real wasabi.)
Real wasabi is amazing. I live in Shizuoka prefecture, so I have ready access to it. In Japanese they call it "hon wasabi" (or root wasabi). The taste varies considerably over the season, but in the winter it is especially sweet. I often eat it on its own (just grated) as an accompaniment to beer. It is not nearly as hot as the horseradish/mustard substitutes, though most Japanese people think I'm crazy until I invite them to try it.
In Shizuoka, anyway, hon wasabi is not so expensive. You can get a root from between $5-10 US. That's enough for probably 10 servings. If you are at any decent sushi restaurant/izakaya you will be given hon wasabi here. Even at cheap kaiten (conveyor-belt) sushi restaurants you can usually order it for a small price.
Pure NaCl and pure KCl are easily distinguished by taste. Salts with different mineral contents will have different taste characteristics.
But that's really more for distinguishing pink Himalayan salt from Utah salt, or similar comparisons between other salt deposits from long-gone ancient seabeds. Fresh sea salt all comes from the same ocean, and salt dried from pools on Japanese shores will taste largely the same as salt from the California coast, or from France.
But much like audiophiles, you will get people who will insist they can taste a difference, right up to the point where you do a double-blind comparison and prove that they can't.
Because people have done triangle tests and concluded that there's no taste difference, holding texture constant (you can tell the difference between kosher and finishing salt because the latter is flakier).
There's a good essay about this in "The Man Who Ate Everything".
If you're talking naturally occurring salt, there may be noticeable amounts of other minerals or salts besides NaCl that could affect the taste. I understand your skepticism, however.
Well, using KCl instead of NaCl is a thing. While the taste is still salty, it has a very weird aftertaste, not pleasant. I've been told it's common in Spain.
OK, well, let's exclude "salt substitutes" from consideration; as the name suggests, that's not really what people generally mean when talking about "salt" in a culinary context.
The point of fancy salts is that they're not just NaCl -- sea salts, in particular, have a lot of other trace minerals with their own flavors (to say nothing of the texture -- generally not so important in flavoring a dish as in finishing).
The minerals themselves are completely irrelevant in taste. They're extremely trace.
Once dissolved, the salt is completely undifferentiatable. The only difference is that if sprinkled on top of food, the size/shape of the salt will change how strong the salt taste is on the tongue and how long it lasts,
Here's an example of one study which found that other minerals play a role in the salty taste perception itself, and also discusses the non-salty volatile flavors present in different sea salts: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1745-459X.2010....
Eh, not sure this is a great study. First, n = 9. Also, I find the abstract really obtusely written:
> [...] three sea salts had 30% less sodium compared to a reference table salt. [...] Salt solutions were evaluated on an equivalent weight and on an equivalent sodium content basis. [...] Salty taste intensity on an equivalent sodium basis was not different (P < 0.05), but time-intensity profiles for salty taste were distinct (P < 0.05).
So what they're saying is, some sea salts have extra minerals which in effect lowers the sodium content per gram. But if you compare a sea salt solution to a table salt solution with equal sodium, they taste equally as intense, but sometimes for different lengths of time. So in other words, you need more sea salt by weight to achieve the same intensity as table salt, but they didn't want to say that.
EDIT: So the time-based intensity seems to mirror what NikolaeVarius said.
And then the "Practical Implications":
> There has been some controversy that sea salt may be healthier than table salts due to the presence of other minerals. This research demonstrates that sea salts harvested from different parts of the world have different mineral content and time-intensity profiles of salty taste. Due to the different time intensity profiles, it may be possible to use less of some sea salts to obtain the same salty taste as a food containing traditional salt but having a lower sodium content.
Unfortunately, I can't read the whole article because paywall, so I can't evaluate how big the time-intensity effect is. For the "salty taste" intensity, they've shown this isn't true. And honestly, that wording wouldn't even fly on Wikipeda, "[t]here has been some controversy". Wow.
(Also interesting that the two authors are both called Drake.)
It also affects how the salt dissolves across various coarser solids and "sticky" liquids. That said, it's not hard to tell the difference in flavors of different salts in an A/B test.
At home, if it's just getting cooked into stuff, we use cheap kosher salt. If it's going on top of something, we're very picky and keep several different salts around (I'm personally fond of relatively inexpensive and widely available Maldon salt).
> Harshly produced industrial salts interfere with the symbiosis of salt, air, and sun, which are part of the salt preservation process. Natural sea salts don’t overpower the base ingredient that is being preserved and allow the inherent strength of those ingredients to interact productively.
This article falls into the wine critic trap of using meaningless terms like "round" to describe flavor.
If you want an example of really high-quality science-based treatment of cooking, take a look at Modernist Cuisine. Minimal bullshit, plenty of chemistry.
And Modernist Cuisine falls into the usual failings of western reductionism - if we can't measure it, it doesn't exist. That's nonsense.
It reminds me of back when I used to do homebrew hi-fi (influenced by the Japanese, naturally). Once you start really listening rather than measuring, you start seeing the flaws of a measurement-driven system. For example, hi-fi equipment is often marketed in terms of THD (total harmonic distortion). Is it actually relevant? No. But it is easy to measure. Measuring the harmonic content of a 1khz sine wave is even less musically relevant than measuring how well a car drives at exactly 60mph in a straight line. It doesn't take into account frequency range, balance, dynamics, phase shift, intermodulation, back EMF from speakers (think about it - a speaker is not only a motor, it's also an alternator, that absorbs mechanical sound energy in its suspension and spits it back down the line as AC energy greatly delayed and distorted from its original form, and the amp outputs have to absorb it), etc. THD is a nonsense measurement. But every manufacturer brags about their THD specs.
That's what happens when you use a measurement-driven, reductionist approach to perception. You value what you measure, whether or not what you measure explains what you observe.
I bet homebrew hi-fi is a great way for getting those "warm" "liquid velvet" sounds. I know if I settle for less when listening to my favorite oob meditation soundtrack (cage's 4'33") then my aura starts vibrating freaky purple all over the place and we all know what a bad day that can make.
You are measuring things too. If there wasn't a physical phenomena happening you wouldn't experience anything! You are using different tools, but you are doing the same thing as us "reductionist westerners".
While I don't think it was stated very clearly, the impression I got from the grandparent poster was that in many cases metrics actually distract from the thing we actually care about, in this case "how does it sound?" You can't really represent that as a number, because in one case "rich resonant lows and a warm sound" might be what you're after, while in another "crisp, distinct highs, and extremely high fidelity" could be preferable, and it is the gestalt that produces the aesthetic quality.
Except that psychology research constantly shows humans can't make consistent assessments of these things (e.g. expensive stuff always "sounds/tastes/looks better" simply because we "know" it's more expensive, even if it's the same as the cheap version). That's the whole reason we use measurements...
So, how do you measure love? Or satisfaction? Or grief? Lots of things exist that cannot be measured.
And really, a lot of the things I mentioned are very hard to measure, because the data source (music) is very dynamic and inconsistent. But that's missing my point... audio equipment is sold using a meaningless measurement because it sounds important and is easy to measure. It has nothing to do with the clearly audible distinctions between different amplifiers.
Why do you think emotion can't be measured? As another poster mentioned, emotions are (unless you have religious objections) the result of physical processes, which can be observed with sufficient equipment.
You're cherry picking your example. This is a single measurement that doesn't capture the relevant qualities of sound but is widely used for social/marketing reasons. That's not the a flaw in reductionism as a philosophical stance or a methodology, it's just PEBKAC.
> That's what happens when you use a measurement-driven, reductionist approach to perception. You value what you measure, whether or not what you measure explains what you observe.
This is just silly. Your observations themselves are measurements, and reductionism done properly should end up systematizing those measurements. Even for subjective qualities, you can measure peoples responses (e.g. how "warm" is this sound, which of these two sounds more "energetic") and (to the extent that those responses are nonrandom) search for relationships to measured quantities.
> And Modernist Cuisine falls into the usual failings of western reductionism - if we can't measure it, it doesn't exist. That's nonsense.
1. I keep seeing this without explanation, what about reductionism is particularly Western? Or is there some brand of reductionism that is distinctly Western versus one that is Eastern?
2. As far as "if we can't measure it it doesn't exist", to the extent that this is the stance of reductionism it's only insofar as measure includes "perceive the effects of". Warmth in music? Counts as a measurement. Roundness of flavor? Counts as a measurement. The goal of reductionism is simply to reduce these to simpler measurements of physical quantities and relationships thereof.
3. If you can't reduce the measurement to something based in physical quantities then either a) we humans consistently perceive it (e.g. in blind taste tests) and your physical quantities or possible relationships are lacking or b) we humans do not consistently perceive it and it's either a poorly defined quality (each person comes up with their own definition based on what it seems to them that it should describe) or it's just a randomly applied label picked up by social instinct. (Critics describe the same wine with different qualities based on the label it was served to them with [1]). Now, that's the nonsense.
This is old, but yeah, reductionism is specifically western. It's derived from Descartes (who believed the entire physical world can be reduced to numbers, and introduced the idea of dualism - there's a world that exists, and a mind that understands), and from Newton, who developed calculus and established what has become the scientific method. Or, as a PhD physicist friend eloquently put it, "Before calculus, we didn't understand how the world worked. With calculus, we do."
In the Newtonian/Cartesian world (reductionism), the entire physical world can be reduced to numbers. You measure and compute. If you don't understand, it's a failure of measurement, not of methodology. The problem is, this neglects many valid distinctions that the mind can recognize, but cannot be measured. In particular, it falls apart on problems of complexity, of interrelationships between many possible states of many possible elements.
As someone who has been cooking Japanese food at home for years, it's fun to see this on the front page.
One thing worth noticing is that most of the items discussed in this article are pretty tough to find in the US — even online, unless you read Japanese (which I don't). Even here in California at your local Japanese grocery it's quite tough. Finding a good source for Gyosho seems nearly impossible. I've been dreaming about opening a Rainbow grocery or Bi Rite quality Japanese grocery store. Don't see myself having the time for that in the near future...
On the other hand — the quality of produce from Hikari Farms [0,1] is really fantastic. And Good Eggs will deliver it to my door!
Of all places, it appears Columbus OH has a pretty decent Japanese supermarket[1]. They have things even "Japanese" supermarkets in California don't have.
Ok, I'll give you a trick if you want to make people believe you can cook asian food: fry stuff (anything, really, can be meat, pasta, mushroom, rice, potatoes, fish) and add soy sauce and garlic. Cooked garlic and soy sauce smells good, tastes good and is the "asian" taste we identify as westerners.
I wanted to like this article---adding some new ideas to my cooking could be fun---but it quickly descended into food snobbery (how one should eat sushi properly etc.) and I checked out.
Yeah, definitely a bit intense in it's snobbery. This makes sense if you're trying to run a high quality restaurant, or don't mind spending a bunch of money. But, for most home cooks, you're going to be hard-pressed to taste really meaningful differences in most kinds of dishes you'd be making at home.
Missed this in the article. It only mentions sushi once, at the top, so not sure exactly what you're referring to.
I think there is a difference between describing what makes something a quality ingredient ("Well-made miso should taste good. The salt and the fermented beer-like notes should balance each other out") vs telling people how to eat something properly, and I didn't feel like I saw much of the latter.
My bad, it was the section on sashimi I was using as an example:
"For dipping sashimi: pour a small pool in the center of the soy sauce dish rather than filling the whole surface of the dish. You can always add more. (And please, no wasabi in the dish. Dab a bit on the slice of sashimi, and dip a corner in the shoyu before eating. The shoyu is used to complement the fish with a hint of salty roundness, but not as a full-on marinade or soak.)"
I'm not entirely sure why you think this is snobbery any more than describing any correct cooking techniques. This passage is factually correct (apart from the wasabi - with a caveat). Sushi is usually accompanied with delicate fish and the sushi chef has to assume some things about how the person will eat it. Obviously, you can eat your sushi any way you want just like you can cook an omelette any way you want. But if you want to know what a typical french omelette tastes like in France, you need to know how to prepare it. That the last step in preparation for sushi is left up to the eater does not change anything in my mind.
So if you are interested and are willing to set the snobbery issue aside, I will tell you what I know. The reason that shoyu is not added to the fish before it is served is because the salt can ruin the texture of the fish. Actually a surprising amount of fish is pre-salted. When you go to a good sushi restaurant, very frequently the chef will tell you to try something without shoyu first. Some of it is obvious (like shimesaba), but there are times when the chef has decided that the fish needs some pre-treatment which includes salt. In that case you probably don't need any extra salt and he will tell you.
Many people don't realise it, but sushi is actually the name of the vinegared rice. Anything with this vinegared rice is sushi. You can have it in a bowl and it is then called sushi meshi. There are many wonderful sushi donburis as well. While it is tempting to think of the value of sushi as being the sashimi perched on top, good sushi is all about the rice. Especially nigiri sushi (where they form in in the hand and place something on top), the way it is formed is crucial to the taste and texture.
That being said, it's quite important when eating good sushi not to soak the rice in shoyu. Of course it is up to you what you do, but I don't think it is unusual to have a feeling that good sushi is being ruined any more than having a very high quality steak and completely covering it in catsup (so you can no longer taste the steak you ordered).
When you apply the shoyu, the normal technique is to invert the sushi so that the sashimi is pointing mostly down and then to dip the edge into the shoyu. This gives you enough salt to complement the flavour of the fish without overpowering it. It also leaves the sushi (which the chef has spent a lifetime perfecting) intact so that you can take advantage of its quality.
Wasabi is a tricky subject. In a very high quality sushi shop the chef will put the correct amount of wasabi between the sushi and the fish. He will watch you eat it and will be able to tell if he has judged the amount correctly. He will adjust accordingly. In a high quality shop, there will be no wasabi offered to be put in your shoyu (in my experience).
This is different from eating sashimi. With sashimi (without the sushi), you get a plate of fish that is accompanied with condiments. The condiments can be wasabi, ginger, sliced green oinion, types of seaweed, etc. You put what you like in the shoyu and dip the sashimi into the shoyu. My wife criticises me for making the wrong choices for what I put in my shoyu, but I live with it ;-)
If you go to a lower class sushi shop (where they are just shovelling out the sushi), very frequently there will be no wasabi between the sushi and the fish. This is because they have no way to tell how much you will like. In this case it is common to put wasabi in your shoyu. If you go to a very bad sushi place which is essentially using machines to put the sushi together, it's often a good practice to take the fish off, put wasabi in the sushi, dip the fish in shoyu and put it back on the sushi. This is because it is crappily put together in the first place so you might as well take some care in reassembling it.
If you go to a very, very bad sushi restaurant, they will often put a lot of wasabi (really hoseradish and mustard) between the sushi and the fish. This is because the fish is off and they are trying to mask the flavour. I don't think it is worth going to these places.
Hope this helps in understanding (my understanding of) the reasons for sushi eating guidelines. I hope it doesn't too snobby (except for the recommendation not to eat at places that serve spoiled fish).
Japanese produce and meats are just fussed over to such a degree for which an American consumer has no frame of reference.
The fruit and veg tend to be larger, less bruised / browned, and overall of better taste. As ingredients this makes for better food. Perhaps less commercialized farming? IDK.
They do spend a larger portion of their household income on groceries, so this is part of the answer.
Edit: By "larger" I don't mean serving size, I mean natural size of the fruit and veg. I lived in Japan for 15+ years. The produce there compared to the produce in my US Trader Joe's, was larger. And tastier. I don't know how they did it, because I too would have assumed that larger meant less tasty. Coming back to the US and seeing scrawny fruit was a shock. I wonder if the US producers are sending their largest / best overseas? Or perhaps TJ's and Fred Meyer is buying B class produce?